Photovoltaic Performance of Dye-Sensitized Solar Cell Low Temperature Growth of ZnO Nanorods Using Chemical Bath Deposition

Abstract

Nanostructured ZnO photoelectrodes were synthesized on fluorine-doped tin oxide (FTO) glass substrates that were spin-coated with a sol-gel based ZnO seed layer via a chemical bath deposition (CBD) method at varying times of 1, 2, 4, and 8 h. Then, TiO2 nanoparticulate electrodes were prepared on ZnO nanorods using the doctor blade technique. The uniformly grown ZnO nanorod layer had a length of approximately 710 nm on the FTO glass substrate with wurtzite structures which was confirmed through X-ray diffraction patterns. The length and diameter of the ZnO nanorods increased with an increase in the deposition time. The DSSCs fabricated with TiO2 nanoparticulate/grown ZnO nanorods and grown for 8 h showed the maximum efficiency (5.51%) with a short circuit current density (J(sc)) of 12.21 mA/cm2 and an open circuit voltage (V(oc)) of 0.70 at 100 mW/cm2 light intensity.

Effect of Solution on One-Step Hydrothermal Growth of ZnO Nanorod Arrays and its Application to Ultraviolet Photodetectors

“…Besides, ZnO is an n-type group II-VI semiconductor material with a large exciton binding energy of 60 meV and a wide-bandgap energy of 3.37 eV at room temperature; it is also environment-friendly owing to its biocompatible properties [1,2]. 1D ZnO NRs have already shown many interesting improvements in electronics devices including field emission displays [3,4], nanoenergy generators [5][6][7][8], photodetectors (PDs) [9][10][11], light-emitting diodes [12,13], gas sensors [14][15][16], biosensors [17][18], and solar cells [19][20][21]. These applications depend on the high structural stability, aspect ratio in geometry, photoconductive gain [22,23], and piezoelectric [24,25] and photoelectric [26,27] effects of ZnO NRs.…”