Improvement in light harvesting of dye-sensitized solar cells with antireflective and hydrophobic textile PDMS coating by facile soft imprint lithography.

We demonstrated the improved conversion efficiency (η) of dye-sensitized solar cells (DSSCs) using the textile-patterned polydimethylsiloxane (PDMS) antireflection layers prepared by metal-coated textile master molds by a simple soft imprint lithography. When light propagates through the textile-patterned surface of PDMS (i.e., textile PDMS) laminated on the outer glass surface deposited with fluorine-doped tin oxide (i.e., FTO/glass), both the transmitted and diffused lights into the photo-anode of DSSCs were simultaneously enhanced. Compared to the bare FTO/glass, the textile PDMS increased the total transmittance from 82.3 to 85.1% and its diffuse transmittance was significantly increased from 5.9 to 78.1% at 550 nm of wavelength. The optical property of textile PDMS was also theoretically analyzed by the finite-difference time-domain simulation. By laminating the textile PDMS onto the outer glass surface of DSSCs, the η was enhanced from 6.04 to 6.51%. Additionally, the fabricated textile PDMS exhibited a hydrophobic surface with water contact angle of ~123.15°.