A Facile Synthesis of ZnO Nanoparticles and Its Application as Photoanode for Dye Sensitized Solar Cells

This work reports the synthesis of ZnO nanoparticles (NPs) by a facile solution method at low temperature and applied as photoanode materials for the fabrication of dye sensitized solar cells (DSSCs). The synthesized materials possessed well defined small spherical nanoparticles with average sizes of ~25 nm. The crystalline nature of synthesized ZnO NPs was analyzed by X-rays diffraction patterns which were perfectly indexed to the crystalline phases of bulk ZnO. The photoanode based synthesized ZnO NPs presented the reasonably good dye absorption of ~2.75×10^-7 mol/cm² through the surface of ZnO NPs thin film. The DSSC fabricated with ZnO NPs photoanode exhibited high solar to electricity energy conversion efficiency of 4.1%. The high short circuit current (J_SC) of 10.36 mA/cm² and open circuit voltage (V_OC) of 0.696 V with fill factor (FF) of 0.57 was achieved by the fabricated solar cell. Herein, the high dye absorption capability of photoanode based ZnO NPs might significantly enhance the light harvesting efficiency and electron transfer rate, resulting in the high J_SC and photovoltaic performance.