Abstract
A facile approach to fabricate dye-sensitized solar cells (DSSCs) is demonstrated by depositing (001) oriented zinc oxide (ZnO) nanostructures on both glass and flexible substrates at room temperature using pulsed laser deposition. Unique crystallographic characteristics of ZnO combined with highly non-equilibrium state of pulsed laser-induced ablated species enabled highly crystalline ZnO nanostructures without aid of any chemically induced additives or organic/inorganic impurities at room temperature. Film morphology as well as internal surface area is tailored by varying ambient oxygen pressure and deposition time. It is revealed that the optimization of these two experimental factors was essential for achieving structure providing large surface area as well as efficient charge collection. The DSSCs with optimized ZnO photoanodes showed overall efficiencies of 3.89 and 3.4 % on glass and polyethylene naphthalate substrates, respectively, under AM 1.5G light illumination. The high conversion efficiencies are attributed to elongated electron lifetime and enhanced electrolyte diffusion in the high crystalline ZnO nanostructures, verified by intensity-modulated voltage spectroscopy and electrochemical impedance measurements.Electronic supplementary materialThe online version of this article (doi:10.1186/s11671-016-1437-2) contains supplementary material, which is available to authorized users.
Highlights
Flexible, light weight dye-sensitized solar cells (DSSCs) based on plastic substrates are one of the most attractive topics in the field of renewable energy [1]
In conclusion, we demonstrate the direct synthesis of Zinc oxide (ZnO) nanostructures on ITO/glass and ITO/polymer substrates with controllable surface area using Pulsed laser deposition (PLD) method
All films showed crystalline ZnO wurzite phase as deposited at room temperature and morphology of the nanostructured film were tuned with the function of ambient gas pressure
Summary
Light weight dye-sensitized solar cells (DSSCs) based on plastic substrates are one of the most attractive topics in the field of renewable energy [1]. Incorporating such flexible substrates would allow light weight, shockresistant power conversion devices [2]. The fabrication of such nanoparticle-based film requires high temperature annealing of the mesoporous photoanodes films at 400–500 °C in order to improve its crystallinity, interconnection between particles and to eliminate residual organic substances. With different surface energies between crystallographic planes, a wide range of high crystalline ZnO nanostructures has been fabricated rather at mild conditions compared to other wideband gap metal oxide materials.
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