Enhanced efficiency of bifacial and back-illuminated Ti foil based flexible dye-sensitized solar cells by decoration of mesoporous SiO₂ layer on TiO₂ anode

The present study focuses on enhancing the efficiency of bifacial and back-illuminated dye-sensitized solar cells (DSCs) by incorporating SiO ₂ mesoporous layer on TiO₂ electrode. The performance of DSCs is investigated by UV-visible spectroscopy, incident photon conversion efficiency (IPCE) and electrochemical impedance spectroscopy (EIS). It is observed that the current ratio of back- to front-DSC increases with the increase in the thickness of SiO₂ layer, which in turn influences the incident light to dyed-TiO₂ electrode, especially in the wavelength of 400-600 nm. The Ti foil based flexible small (0.28 cm²) and sub-module (5 cm × 10 cm) DSCs having this modification show high conversion efficiencies of 6.76 and 5.54% respectively under 100 mW cm ^-2 (AM 1.5).