Fiber Solar Cells

Flexible solar cells with the advantages of lightweight, foldability, and low cost, and extensive applications have attracted much academic interest and industrial attention during the last decades. The superiority of fiber cell is the most significant advantage of all non-flat-structured solar cells: 1. The non-flat structured solar cell gets rid of the dependence on transparent conductive oxide. 2.The fiber cell, which has a three-dimensional (3-D) structure, can catch photons from all directions to increase the power output of cells for improved optical structure capability. Meanwhile, the fiber cell has very low dependence on incident light angle and can gather diffused reflected light to maintain weatherproof and stable power output. 3. The fiber cell is a macro 1-D structure and has a smaller package area ratio than the 2-D structure. Making a larger cell requires only increasing the length of the cell. 4. The flexible fiber cell can directly adopt traditional preparation technology, whereas special technologies must be adopted to make all kinds of traditional flexible flat cells (like OPV and DSSC) to ensure that the flexible substrate will not be damaged during the preparation process, such as by low temperature. 5. Existing textile techniques can be directly used in weaving for mass production of fiber cells, another further improvement of the traditional roll-to-roll technology for producing flexible electrical devices. This chapter reviews the various types of fiber-shaped flexible solar cells and their characteristics.