ZnO nanoparticles based dye sensitized solar cell: Fabrication and characterization

Abstract

Dye sensitized solar cells (DSSCs) are promisingly eco-friendly, clean, efficient, simple fabrication process and low cost photovoltaic (PV) device as compared to conventional silicon based device. It can also be used in building-integrated PV, serving as flexible devices for walls or windows. The main components of DSSCs are dyes and semiconductor oxides. The various semiconductor oxides like SnO2, TiO2, ZnO, and Nb2O5 etc. have been used as an electron transport medium. Among these materials, ZnO has shown effective performance and good choice for DSSCs due to its distinctive qualities such as easy synthesis, non-Toxic, low cost and broad energy bandgap (∼3.37 eV). In this paper, we demonstrate the synthesis of ZnO nanoparticles (NPs) with their XRD pattern and UV-visible characterization. Using this ZnO NPs DSSC was fabricated under ambient condition and effective power conversion efficiency (η) ∼2.4% was obtained. It also shows other relevant PV parameters: fill factor (FF), open-circuit voltage (Voc) and short-circuit current density (Jsc).