Abstract
The manufacture of the dye-sensitized solar cell (DSSC) requires the sintering of TiO2 paste at 450–550 °C. High-temperature sintering is disadvantageous because it prevents the use of the materials with poor resistance to high sintering temperatures (e.g., substrate and transparent electrode). In this study, we develop a new technique of reducing the sintering temperature to 250–300 °C using dielectric barrier discharge (DBD) treatment. The DBD treatment of a 250–300 °C-sintered sample has the effects of removing the organic binder in the TiO2 paste, accelerating the necking of TiO2 nanoparticles, and chemically modifying the TiO2 surface. As a result, the energy conversion efficiency of low-temperature-sintered DSSC becomes approximately equivalent to 450–550 °C-sintered DSSCs. DBD treatment is also applied to a binder-free TiO2 paste that was developed for the low-temperature sintering of plastic substrate DSSCs. The energy conversion efficiency of the binder-free paste DSSC sintered at 150 °C is improved by a factor of 1.4 using DBD treatment.
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