纤维状染料敏化太阳能电池研究进展

Research progress on fiber-shaped dye-sensitized solar cells

纤维状染料敏化太阳能电池(F-DSSCs)是将具有光伏功能的单元高效地组装在高曲率非平面结构的纤维状导电基底上所构建的柔性染料敏化太阳能电池.由于它突破了传统平板基底的限制,具有可弯折、质量轻、方便运输、应用前景广等优点,引起各国科研工作者的广泛关注.本文简要介绍了F-DSSCs的基本结构及工作原理,并在此基础上结合近年来国内外的相关研究工作,重点介绍工作电极、对电极、电解质等的研究现状,同时也展望了F-DSSCs的未来发展趋势及应用前景.

As the increasingly serious problems of fossil energy depletion and environmental pollutions, exploiting the clean renewable energy resources has become the urgency. Solar energy is one of the important renewable energy resources, and its effective utilization will exert a great influence on solving energy and environmental problems. Solar cells, which convert solar energy to electrical energy, represent a promising candidate to use renewable energies. In the past 20 years, the dye-sensitized solar cells （DSSCs） have drawn much attention from both academia and industry due to its low cost, environment-friendliness and high efficiency. It was reported that the efficiency of traditional DSSCs using fluorine- doped tin oxide （FTO） glass as the working electrode substrate exceeded 12% （100 mW/cm2）. But rigid flat-shaped DSSCs are unfavorable for installation, transportation, and application as a result of their extreme brittleness and heaviness. Therefore, the development of flexible cells has become a challenge. Fiber-shaped dye-sensitized solar cells （F-DSSCs） are flexible DSSCs that fabricated by assembling the photovoltaic function on the surface of fiber-shaped conductive substrate with high curvature structure. The fiber cells show unique and promising advantages： （1） Since they have a three-dimensional structure and very low dependence on incident light angle, they can catch more photons from all directions and gather diffused/reflected light to improve the power output of the cell. （2） The fiber cell has smaller package area ratio. A larger area cell can be assembled by simply increasing the length of the cell. The characteristic of F-DSSCs is that when the cells go up to some extent, the package area of the cell remains basically unchanged, which has a great significance in maintaining the stability of F-DSSCs with larger size. （3） F-DSSCs can directly adopt traditional preparation technology, even under milder processing conditions, such as low temperature. （4） F-DSSCs are lightweight so that they are easy to be woven into clothes or integrated into other structures by existing textile techniques, which enables applications in electronic textiles and various complex devices. Therefore, extensive attention has recently been paid to develop F-DSSCs photovoltalc devices, and the maximum energy conversion efficiencies have exceeded 8%. However, a few critical scientific issues still need to be addressed. Firstly, it is necessary to make further and deeper research on solid-state electrolytes to improve the stability of F-DSSCs. Secondly, more efforts are required to explore new photoactive materials and electrodes. Meanwhile, optimizing the F-DSSCs structures and developing the scale-up technologies will enhance the conversion efficiencies which are currently much lower than traditional planar DSSCs counterparts. Thirdly, F-DSSCs may be integrated with other energy storage parts to produce more efficient devices. To accomplish this, much more efforts should be made to optimize the structure and improve the performance of the integrated fiber. In this review, the basic structure and working principle of F-DSSCs are briefly introduced. The related researches in recent years are reviewed in detail, including working electrodes, counter electrodes and electrolytes. At the same time, future development trends are forecasted.