A study on the improvement of the interface contact and the prevention of the charge recombination by the surface treatment of transparent conductive oxide in Dye-sensitized solar cell

Dye-sensitized solar cell (DSC) has been considered as a possible alternative to current silicon based p-n junction photovoltaic devices due to its advantages of high efficiency, simple fabrication process and low production cost. Numerous researches for high efficient DSC in the various fields are under way even now. Among them, the compact layer, which prevents the back electron transfer between transparent conductive oxides and the redox electrolyte, is fabricated by various methods such as a ZnO dip-coating, TiCl₄ dip-coating, and Ti sputtering. In this study, we tried to fabricate the TiO₂ compact layer by the spin-coating method using aqueous TiCl₄ solution. The effect of the spin-coating method was checked as compared with conventional dip-coating method. As a result, DSC with a spin-coated compact layer had 33.4% and 6% better efficiency than standard DSC and DSC with a dip-coated compact layer.