Screen Printed Dye-Sensitized Solar Cells (DSSCs) on Woven Polyester Cotton Fabric for Wearable Energy Harvesting Applications

Recently, the demand for lightweight, flexible and wearable dye-sensitized solar cells has been increased rapidly. One driver for this is to meet the challenge of supplying power in e-textiles applications. Integrating this functionality in the textile will result in an improved feel of the fabric compared to the current approach of the integration of conventional plastic solar patches. A low temperature processed TiO2 paste was used in this work to develop a fabrication method based on screen printing and spray coating to obtain photovoltaic textiles. The fabrication method used is low temperature and is compatible with Kapton and standard woven 65/35 polyester cotton fabrics. Comparing to the latest literatures, [1-3] our results show an improved PV efficiency of 7.03% and 2.78% on Kapton and fabric respectively when using a platinum coated fluorine tin oxide (FTO) glass as the top electrode. (C) 2018 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved. (C) 2018 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.