Printing, a simple and cost-effective deposition technique, is developed to fabricate mesoporous titania films for upscaling dye-sensitized solar cells (DSSCs). The different deposition methods strongly affect the final morphology, and further device efficiency as well. Therefore, a deep understanding of structure formation is significant for optimizing the industrial coating films. We provide insights into the structure length-scale change via in situ study of slot-die printed mesoporous titania films. The solution synthesis is performed by a structure-directing template polystyrene-block-polyethylene oxide (PS-b-PEO) assisted with sol-gel chemistry. The titania/PS-b-PEO composite films is obtained via slot-die printing with combination of sol-gel solution. In situ grazing-incidence small-angle X-ray scattering (GISAXS) enables us to reveal the nanoscale morphology evolution of the composite films during the fabrication process. The resulting mesoporous titania films with high order are fabricated by using a high-temperature route and employed as photoanodes of DSSCs. In addition, a low-temperature processing route enables the fabrication of light-weight and flexible solar cells on thin polymer substrates, as well as reduction of pay-back times and environmental impact. Through using a different titania precursor, the composite films for fabricating low-temperature mesoporous titania is also investigated via in situ GISAXS. We successfully provided both high-temperature and low-temperature routes to obtain mesoporous titania films using the slot-die printing and explored their in-situ morphology evolution process by the advanced synchrotron based scattering method. The working DSSCs demonstrate an alternative large-scale manufacturing of photoanodes.

In situ study of slot-die printed titania photoanodes for up-scale fabrication of dye-sensitized solar cells

Macromolecular Chemistry: The Second Century

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ACS Spring 2020 National Meeting & Expo

The official archive and repository for all ACS Meetings & Expositions abstracts and select posters or presentations.