Titanium tetrachloride (TiCl 4 ) treatment processed by chemical bath deposition is usually adopted as preand post-treatment for nanocrystalline titanium dioxide (TiO 2 ) film deposition in the dye-sensitized solar cell (DSC) technology. Pre-treatment influences positively the bonding strength between the fluorinated tin oxide (FTO) substrate and the porous TiO 2 layer, blocking the charge recombination at the interface between the conduction glass FTO and the I 3 − ions present in the I − /I 3 − red-ox couple. Additionally, TiCl 4 posttreatment is a widely known method capable of improving the performance of dye-sensitized solar cells, in particular, the photocurrent collected from the device. In this study, the influence and effect of TiCl 4 pre-and post-treatment on the TiO 2 layer is proposed and compared to the untreated film. The relative DSC devices are characterized in terms of short circuit current density, open circuit voltage, fill factor, conversion efficiency and IPCE. The dark current characteristics of cells with a treated and untreated TiO 2 layer are also shown in order to evaluate the effect of TiCl 4 pre-treatment as a blocking layer.

Over the past few years, dye-sensitized solar cell (DSC) research has been focused on the material and process cost\ud reduction, and on the electronics integration of the devices.Monolithic design is one of the most promising DSC architectures for\ud mass production, because it allows the elimination of one conductive substrate and offers the possibility of printing layer-by-layer\ud the materials that compose the structure. In this study, the formulation, the realization, and the processing of the spacer and the\ud catalyst layers are proposed, and the relative performance in terms of J–V characteristics, incident photon to current conversion efficiency, and impedance analysis of the device with the optimized material thickness is reported. The optimized profile of the overall structure permits us to obtain masked cells with a conversion efficiency of about 5% with no chemical treatment