Fabrication of Spacer and Catalytic Layers in Monolithic Dye-Sensitized Solar Cells

Over the past few years, dye-sensitized solar cell (DSC) research has been focused on the material and process cost reduction, and on the electronics integration of the devices. Monolithic design is one of the most promising DSC architectures for mass production, because it allows the elimination of one conductive substrate and offers the possibility of printing layer-by-layer the materials that compose the structure. In this study, the formulation, the realization, and the processing of the spacer and the catalyst layers are proposed, and the relative performance in terms of J-V characteristics, incident photon to current conversion efficiency, and impedance analysis of the device with the optimized material thickness is reported. The optimized profile of the overall structure permits us to obtain masked cells with a conversion efficiency of about 5% with no chemical treatment.