Abstract
The vapor-liquid-solid (VLS) process was applied to fabricate zinc oxide nanowires (ZnO NWs) with a different aspect ratio (AR), morphological, and optical properties. The ZnO NWs were grown on a system that contains a quartz substrate with transparent conductive oxide (TCO) thin film followed by an Al-doped ZnO (AZO) seed layer; both films were grown by magnetron sputtering at room temperature. It was found that the ZnO NWs presented high crystalline quality and vertical orientation from different structural and morphological characterizations. Also, NWs showed a good density distribution of 69 NWs/μm2 with a different AR that offers their capability to be used as possible photoelectrode (anode) in potential future device applications. The samples optical properties were studied using various techniques such as photoluminescence (PL), absorption, and transmittance before and after sensitization with N719 dye. The results demonstrated that NW with 30 nm diameter had the best characteristics as feasible photoelectrode (anode) (high absorption, minimum recombination, high crystallinity). Also, the present samples optical properties were found to be improved due to the existence of N719 dye and Au nanoparticles on the tip of NWs. NWs grown in this work can be used in different photonic and optoelectronic applications.
Highlights
Energy production is satisfied by conventional energetic technologies based on natural gas, coal, oil
We show the fabrication of zinc oxide nanowires (ZnO NWs) with a different aspect ratio (AR) and good crystallinity obtained by the VLS process
The variation in AR is due to the four thicknesses of Au layers deposited as a metal catalyst for the VLS process, that resulted in a change of the diameter of the Au liquid drops and, as a consequence, different diameters of the nanowires are obtained (Güell et al, 2016)
Summary
Energy production is satisfied by conventional energetic technologies based on natural gas, coal, oil. The regeneration of the oxidized dye is due to a redox reaction produced inside the electrolyte (Boschloo, 2019) Outstanding their simplicity in the fabrication technique and economical way of processing, these methods have drawn a significant consideration as in contrast to traditional solar cells (Bisquert et al, 2004; Grätzel, 2005; Wang et al, 2006; Gong et al, 2012, 2017; Jung and Lee, 2013; Scalia et al, 2018; Juang et al, 2019) and present satisfactory conversion proficiency (13 –14%) (Hagfeldt et al, 2010; Parisi et al, 2014; Freitag et al, 2017). One of the most common semiconductors is TiO2, which is widely used as a photoelectrode (anode) in a DSSC device due to the great surface area of the network nanoparticles and physical and chemical stability; ZnO is an exciting alternative for the electrode due to the similar, even better electrical properties compared to TiO2 (Canto-Aguilar et al, 2017; Boschloo, 2019)
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