Plasma Processing of Surfaces and Nanostructured Coatings for Flexible and Printed Electronics

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Authors

HOMOLA Tomáš

Year of publication 2018
Type Conference abstract
MU Faculty or unit

Faculty of Science

Citation
Description Flexible and printed photovoltaics can contribute greatly to increasing global access to cheap energy. Dye-sensitized solar cells (DSSC) and perovskite solar cells, in which the photo-electrochemical system relies upon a mesoporous crystalline TiO2 layer, have emerged as a promising low-cost photovoltaic technology and constitute a notable application field for semiconducting photoanodes. Fine mesoporous TiO2 films are usually cured at high temperatures by means of a slow convection heating procedure (at least 30 min above 350 °C) in order reliably to remove all organic components present in the coating formulation. The high sintering temperature, however, precludes the use of such a procedure for thermally sensitive and flexible substrates and results in performance deterioration in transparent conducting oxide substrates. We prepared hybrid mesoporous titania/silica electron-generating and transporting layers using wet coating with a dispersion consisting of prefabricated titania nanoparticles and a methyl-silica binder. Titania/methyl-silica wet layers were deposited by inkjet printing on ITO/PET flexible foils and further mineralized by low-temperature (70 °C) atmospheric-pressure air plasma using diffuse coplanar surface barrier discharge (DCSBD) to form a titania/silica hybrid nanocomposite coating 1. The plasma mineralization process provides production performance superior to the previously-considered processes (thermal sintering and UV curing 2), taking only a fraction of the time required for them at far lower temperatures. The coating can be applied on flexible polymer which makes the application suitable for fast roll-to-roll fabrication units. The reported method could constitute a major step forward in the large-scale manufacture of low-cost flexible functional coatings 3.
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