Improved Performance of Dye Sensitized Solar Cells using Ag/Ca doped and co-doped ZnO as Photoanode Materials

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An innovative technology for energy harvesting that transforms direct sunlight into electrical energy is dye-sensitized solar cells. Since these cells are flexible, lightweight, inexpensive, environmentally benign and involve a straightforward production method, they have far superior qualities to silicon-based solar cells. Since, a photoanode is the backbone of dye-sensitized solar cell (DSSC), we synthesized ZnO and Ag/Ca doped-codoped ZnO nanoparticles using sol-gel technique. The optical, morphological, and structural characteristics of prepared samples were thoroughly examined. XRD, FESEM-EDX, and UV-Vis were among the methods used to characterize the produced nanoparticles. The X-ray diffraction data showed that the wurtzite structure was single-phase hexagonal and did not contain any impurity phases. The effective integration of Ag/Ca ions into the host ZnO structure is further validated by XRD. Additionally, the XRD investigation demonstrates that the Wurtzite structure of ZnO remains unchanged when Ag/Ca is substituted for ZnO. According to the FESEM morphological images, the produced nanoparticles have a spherical form. The EDAX spectra confirm the presence of Zn, Ca, Ag and O atoms in the samples, while the optical transparency and band gap values were analyzed using UV-Vis spectroscopy. The Co-doping Ca/Ag resulted in a decrease in the energy band gap as determined by Tauc’ plot. J-V characterisation was used to assess the electrochemical properties of fill factor, open circuit voltage, and short circuit current density. This signifies a 215.39% enhancement in efficiency compared to the pure ZnO-based photoanode utilized in DSSCs.