ZnO Nanostructures for Dye Sensitized Solar Cells /

Abstract

Development of cost effective and easily scalable energy systems for harvesting renewable solar energy is attractive proposal for future. This work presents facile synthesis of ZnO nanostructures with different morphologies simply providing different solvating conditions in a hydrothermal process, for their subsequent use in dye sensitized solar cell (DSSC) device. ZnO nanoprisms were obtained in aqueous solution where addition of methanol/ethanol resulted in formation of hollow nanoprims while methanol in alkaline solution yield ZnO nanorice morphology. The obtained nanostructures were characterized for structural, morphological, elemental, optical and surface area analysis. Then devices were fabricated using the grown nanostructure and tested their response under 1 sun conditions for dye sensitized solar cells with N719 dye loading. Among the different nanostructure morphologies, ZnO nonorice showed superior performance reaching the maximum conversion efficiency. We attribute this to the large surface area, better conductivity, and enhanced dye adsorption of nanorice in comparison to the other synthesized ZnO nanostructures.