Textile-based dye-sensitized solar cells (DSSCs) can be created by building the necessary layers on a textile fabric or around fibers which are afterwards used to prepare a textile layer, typically by weaving. Another approach is using electrospun nanofiber mats as one or more layers. In this work, electrospun polyacrylonitrile (PAN) nanofiber mats coated by a conductive polymer poly(3,4-ethylenedioxythiopene) polystyrene sulfonate (PEDOT:PSS) were used to produce the counter electrodes for half-textile DSSCs. The obtained efficiencies were comparable with the efficiencies of pure glass-based DSSCs and significantly higher than the efficiencies of DSSCs with cotton based counter electrodes. The efficiency could be further increased by increasing the number of PEDOT:PSS layers on the counter electrode. Additionally, the effect of the post treatment of the conductive layers by HCl, acetic acid, or dimethyl sulfoxide (DMSO) on the DSSC efficiencies was investigated. Only the treatment by HCl resulted in a slight improvement of the energy-conversion efficiency.

Linearized equivalent electrical-circuit representation of dye-sensitized solar cells is helpful both for the better understanding of the physical processes in the cell as well as for various optimizations of the cells. White-box and grey-box modelling approaches are well-known and they are widely used for standard cell types. However, in the case of new cell types or the lack of deep knowledge of the cell’s physic such approaches may not be applicable immediately. In this article a black-box approach for such cases is presented applied together with spectral analysis. The spectral analysis and the black-box approach were as first validated with a standard glass-based dye-sensitized solar cell and thereafter applied for the characterization of a new type of textile-based dye-sensitized solar cells. Although there are still improvement potentials, the results are encouraging and the authors believe that the black-box method with spectral analysis may be used particularly for new types of dye-sensitized solar cells.