Bifacial transparent solid-state dye-sensitized solar cell with sputtered indium-tin-oxide counter electrode

In this study, we report a solid state dye-sensitized solar cell (SSDSC) made with a transparent ITO film as a counter electrode using the sputtering technology. For the first time, a bifacial transparent SSDSC is realized and irradiated from FTO and ITO side. The SSDSCs give short circuit photocurrent density (J(sc)) of 4.16 mA cm(-2), open circuit voltage (V-oc) of 0.74 V, and fill factor (FF) of 0.64, corresponding to the photoelectric conversion efficiency of 1.96% from FTO side illumination (AM 1.5G, 100 mW cm(-2)). Moreover, it is found that J(sc) of SSDSCs (2.85 mA cm(-2)) when irradiated from ITO side is less than that from FTO side. This result is because of the cut-off of incident photons in the blue region by the ITO film and the light screening effect by the hole transport material (HTM) absorption. Our results demonstrate the possibility of production scalable sputtering process for SSDSCs electrodes fabrication and pave the avenue for tandem design application which requires a transparent intermediate layer for interconnection. (C) 2012 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.