title: Low-temperature fabrication of dye-sensitized solar cells by transfer of composite porous layers.
abstract: Dye-sensitized solar cells have established themselves as a potential low-cost alternative to conventional solar cells owing to their remarkably high power-conversion efficiency combined with 'low-tech' fabrication processes. As a further advantage, the active layers consisting of nanoporous TiO2 are only some tens of micrometres thick and are therefore in principle suited for flexible applications. However, typical flexible plastic substrates cannot withstand the process temperatures of up to 500 degrees C commonly used for sintering the TiO2 nanoparticles together. Even though some promising routes for low-temperature sintering have been proposed, those layers cannot compete as regards electrical properties with layers obtained with the standard high-temperature process. Here we show that by a lift-off technique, presintered porous layers can be transferred to an arbitrary second substrate, and the original electrical properties of the transferred porous layers are maintained. The transfer process is greatly assisted by the application of composite layers comprising nanoparticles and nanorods.
authors.affiliation: Materials Science Laboratory, Sony Deutschland GmbH, Stuttgart, Germany. duerr@sony.de
authors.forename: Michael
authors.initials: M
authors.lastname: Dürr
authors.forename: Andreas
authors.initials: A
authors.lastname: Schmid
authors.forename: Markus
authors.initials: M
authors.lastname: Obermaier
authors.forename: Silvia
authors.initials: S
authors.lastname: Rosselli
authors.forename: Akio
authors.initials: A
authors.lastname: Yasuda
authors.forename: Gabriele
authors.initials: G
authors.lastname: Nelles