Efficient all-printable solid-state dye-sensitised solar cell based on a low resistivity carbon composite counter electrode and highly doped hole transport material

Gregory Wilson^a, Timothy Jones^a, Noel Duffy^b

^aCSIRO Clayton Laboratories, Bayview Avenue, Clayton VIC, 3168, Australia

^bCSIRO Clayton Laboratories, Bayview Avenue, Clayton VIC, 3168, Australia

International Conference on Hybrid and Organic Photovoltaics
Proceedings of International Conference on Hybrid and Organic Photovoltaics 2015 (HOPV15)

Roma, Italy, 2015 May 11th - 13th

Organizer: Filippo De Angelis

Poster, Timothy Jones, 151
Publication date: 5th February 2015

Inexpensive solar cells based on abundant, non-toxic, solution processable materials have the potential to revolutionize the renewables industry. For the dye-sensitised solar cell, significant cost reductions are possible by replacing the counter electrode conducting glass substrate with a printable carbon electrode, based on a composite of graphite, carbon black and an inorganic binder. In this monolithic all-printable design, a porous insulating spacer acts to prevent direct electrical shunting between the photo- and counter electrode. In typical monolithic liquid junction devices, the electrolyte completely penetrates these pores. High ionic mobility coupled with high concentrations and quantitative pore filling, adequate ionic conductivity is attained. However, sealing is troublesome with such high-performance electrolytes, leading to increased chance of cell failure. Thus, a solid-state hole transport material is preferred for practical applications. However, the incumbent spiro-OMeTAD molecular hole transport material (HTM) has a low solubility and intrinsic hole mobility. These manifest in decreased electronic conductivity in the mesoporous film, and thus large series resistance and fill factor losses. This necessitates the need for doping of the HTM to overcome the large resistance associated with this device component. Furthermore, lateral series resistance losses often present in the carbon counter electrode on account of high sheet resistance must also be overcome. Here we present high performance monolithic all-printable solid-state dye-sensitised solar cells. Doping the HTM improves all performance parameters (see Figure 1). The performance is optimised via reduction of the resistance associated with the printable carbon counter electrode and the HTM infiltrated into the porous spacer. We show that doping with prepared spiro-OMeTAD(TFSI)₂ is a simple, controlled and effective way of increasing the conductivity of a HTM, and ultimately leads to more efficient devices with more reproducible performance. Together with some of the highest conductivity carbon-based counter electrodes present in the literature, we are able to demonstrate this by fabricating a batch of 8 devices at 1 cm² scale with an average efficiency over 3%.
Figure 1: Optimisation of performance with spiro-OMeTAD(TFSI)2 dopant level in all-printed ssDSCs. (a) Voc; (b) jsc; (c) FF; (d) η

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