Effect of Randomly Grown Morphology of ZnO Nanorods in Inverted Organic Solar Cells

Abstract

Here, we analyzed the photovoltaic properties of the inverted organic solar cells (IOSCs) by using randomly oriented medium density ZnO nanorods (ZnO-NR) synthesized hydrothermally at low temperature conditions to avoid morphological defects. The IOSC with ZnO-NR (length < 150 nm) of medium density and random orientation showed an improvement of 83% in power conversion efficiency compared to the cell with (length < 20 nm) hydrothermally grown ZnO-NR. The optimized hydrothermal growth conditions for ZnO-NR enhanced the photovoltaic performance indicators by reducing recombination rate evidenced by the photovoltaic data. The qualitative elemental analysis of the ZnO-NR based interface was performed by the EDX, which confirmed that the as-grown ZnO-NR contain the Zn and O elements.