Recent progress in inkjet-printed solar cells

Abstract

In the past few decades, the fabrication of solar cells has been considered as one of the most promising ways to meet the increasing energy demands to support the development of modern society as well as to control the environmental pollution caused by the combustion of fossil fuels.

Inkjet printed mesoscopic perovskite solar cells with custom design capability

“…26 If however the customizability of digital drop-on-demand DOD technology shall be exploited, all stacks of the MPSC must be printed by inkjet. As reviewed by Peng et al 27 and Karunakaran et al, 28 most of the efforts so far have focused on inkjet printing the absorber layer or one of the device electrodes. To the best of our knowledge, there has been no work reporting on the fabrication of perovskite solar cells by inkjet printing all active layers.…”

Influence of the thermal annealing on the morphological and structural properties of ZnO films deposited onto polyimide substrates by ink-jet printing

“…2D printing is a fast (for example, ordinary office printer allows to deposit 1 m 2 coating only for 20 min) and zero waste which opens the way to obtain coatings onto flexible substrates with predefined sizes [1][2][3]. The flexible solar cells, thermoelectric generators, sensors, among others, have already been developed by applying the 2D printing technique [4][5][6]. For such devices, that is important to obtain high-quality functional elements, for instance, buffer and window films for solar cells; n-type leg for thermoelectric generators; sensitive elements for sensors.…”

Smart polymers and nanocomposites for 3D and 4D printing

“…Using inkjet printing process substantially decreases the cost production of thin film solar cells while enhancing their efficiencies. Photoactive materials with a thickness of less than 100 microns can be deposited on either rigid or flexible substrates using the inkjet printers which can be barely achieved with conventional screen printers that use silicon wafers (due to the indirect bandgap of c-Si) [279], [284].…”

“…The morphology and the interfacial properties of the inkjet printed PV film are also highly dependent on the solution formulation and the inkjet latency time (gelation effect). The inkjet latency time of the photoactive blend can be controlled by adjusting the regioregularity of the polymer donor (P3HT) [282], [284].…”