Study On The Wearable Dye-Sensitized Solar Cell Textile

The tremendous developments in wearable electronics have brought a revolution to our way of life,which makes it an urgent requirement to develop novel sustainable and wearable power sources.However,traditional batteries were mostly fabricated in a planar form,which are too bulky,heavy and rigid for applications in mobile electronics.Various efforts have been devoted to a more flexible techniques for energy harvesting.In recent years,fiber-shaped energy sources,such as fiber-shaped solar cell,fibershaped supercapacitors and fiber-shaped batteries,have explosively emerged,which process better portablity,higher integrate-ablity and get rid of the incident-light-angle limitation.However,the energy of a single fiber device can not satisfy the power requirement of commercial electronics.In order to provide a higher power output,it is an effective strategy to weave fiber devices into textile.Herein,industrial weaving technology were introduced and modified to integrate fiber-shaped dye sensitized solar cell(DSSC)into a wearable energy textile.It provide a novel solution to power the portable electronics,by fabricating an all-solid photovoltaic textile via a shuttle-flying process.In addition,fiber-shaped DSSC were also woven with fiber-based supercapacitor(SC)and triboelectric nanogenerator(TENG)in a similar manner,in order to proveide a wearable energy textile which could work day-and-night.Main researching results were listed as follows:(1)Low-cost Mn metal with better energy-level match was coated on metal and polymer fibers,which could serve as a new type of substrate for fiber-shaped DSSC photoanode.After process optimization,ZnO-nanowire arrays were grown on the substrate and successfully realized a type of portable and flexible photoanode for allsolid fiber-shape DSSC,which was more suitable for further weaving and integrating process.(2)On the basis of a self-made weaving machine,strings of the fiber-shaped polymer photoanodes coated with Mn and Cu counter electrodes(CE)coated with Au were woven in an interlaced manner,to form a single layered textile.Colorful and flexible photovoltaic textile modules with arbitrary size and various knitting patterns were demonstrated as a wearable power source for portable and flexible electronics.Under a standard light intensity of 100 mW cm-2,an open-circuit voltage of 4.6 V and a short-circuit current density of 7.8 mA cm-2 were achieved,corresponding to an efficiency of 1.3%,which can power a commercial calculator as well as effectively splitting the water.(3)In order to power electronics by solar energy day-and-night,we present an all-solid tailorable energy textile possessing integrated function of solar energy harvesting and storage,by combining fiber-shaped dye sensitized solar cell and fiber-based supercapacitor in a textile way.The textile sample can be fully charged to 1.2 V in 17 s by harvesting solar energy,and fully discharged in 78 s at a discharge current of 0.1 mA.Furthermore,our technique makes it possible to tailor the textile into any designed shape without impairing its performance and produce stylish smart energy garments for wearable self-powering system with enhanced user experience and more room for fashion design.(4)For the sustainable working of portable devices,we fabricated a micro-cable power textile for simultaneously harvesting energy from ambient sunshine and mechanical movement.Solar cells fabricated from lightweight polymer fibres into micro cables are then woven via a shuttle-flying process with fibre-based triboelectric nanogenerators to create a smart fabric.A single layer of such fabric is 320 ?m thick and can be integrated into various cloths,curtains,tents and so on.This hybrid power textile,fabricated with a size of 4 cm by 5 cm,was demonstrated to charge a 2 mF commercial capacitor up to 2 V in 1 min under ambient sunlight in the presence of mechanical excitation,such as human motion and wind blowing.The textile could continuously power an electronic watch,directly charge a cell phone and drive water splitting reactions.