title: A lightweight polymer solar cell textile that functions when illuminated from either side.
abstract: An all-solid-state, lightweight, flexible, and wearable polymer solar cell (PSC) textile with reasonable photovoltaic performance has been developed. A metal textile electrode made from micrometer-sized metal wires is used as the cathode, and the surfaces of the metal wires are dip-coated with the photoactive layers. Two ultrathin, transparent, and aligned carbon nanotube sheets that exhibit remarkable electronic and mechanical properties were coated onto the modified metal textile at both sides as the anode to produce the desired PSC textile. Because of the designed sandwich structure, the PSC textile displays the same energy conversion efficiencies regardless of which side it is irradiated from. As expected, the PSC textiles are highly flexible, and their energy conversion efficiencies varied by less than 3% after bending for more than 200 cycles. The PSC textile shows an areal density (5.9 mg cm(-2)) that is lower than that of flexible film-based PSCs (31.3 mg cm(-2)).
authors.affiliation: State Key Laboratory of Molecular Engineering of Polymers, Department of Macromolecular Science, and Laboratory of Advanced Materials, Fudan University, Shanghai 200438 (China).
authors.forename: Zhitao
authors.initials: Z
authors.lastname: Zhang
authors.forename: Xueyi
authors.initials: X
authors.lastname: Li
authors.forename: Guozhen
authors.initials: G
authors.lastname: Guan
authors.forename: Shaowu
authors.initials: S
authors.lastname: Pan
authors.forename: Zhengju
authors.initials: Z
authors.lastname: Zhu
authors.forename: Dayong
authors.initials: D
authors.lastname: Ren
authors.forename: Huisheng
authors.initials: H
authors.lastname: Peng
keywords: carbon nanotubes; electrochemistry; energy conversion; polymers; solar cells