Wearable solar cells by stacking textile electrodes.
A new and general method to produce flexible, wearable dye-sensitized solar cell (DSC) textiles by the stacking of two textile electrodes has been developed. A metal-textile electrode that was made from micrometer-sized metal wires was used as a working electrode, while the textile counter electrode was woven from highly aligned carbon nanotube fibers with high mechanical strengths and electrical conductivities. The resulting DSC textile exhibited a high energy conversion efficiency that was well maintained under bending. Compared with the woven DSC textiles that are based on wire-shaped devices, this stacked DSC textile unexpectedly exhibited a unique deformation from a rectangle to a parallelogram, which is highly desired in portable electronics. This lightweight and wearable stacked DSC textile is superior to conventional planar DSCs because the energy conversion efficiency of the stacked DSC textile was independent of the angle of incident light.
State Key Laboratory of Molecular Engineering of Polymers, Department of Macromolecular Science and Laboratory of Advanced Materials, Fudan University, Shanghai 200438 (China); School of Materials Science and Engineering and Institute for Advanced Materials and Nano Biomedicine, Tongji University, 4800 Caoan Road, Shanghai 201804 (China).
Shaowu
S
Pan
Zhibin
Z
Yang
Peining
P
Chen
Jue
J
Deng
Houpu
H
Li
Huisheng
H
Peng
dye-sensitized solar cells; electron transfer; energy conversion; light-emitting diodes