Use of Degussa P25 titanium-dioxide nanopowder in dye-sensitized solar cell (DSSC) photoanode improves efficiency of the DSSC cell. Annealing of titanium dioxide is required for fabrication of crystalline mesoporous thin film photoanode on transparent conducting glass using doctor blade method. Different annealing temperatures provide different structural, morphological, and optical properties of the photoanode, which may influence the efficiency of the cell. In this paper, energy-dispersive X-ray spectroscopy (EDS), scanning electron microscopy (SEM), X-ray powder diffraction (XRD), and UV-Vis-NIR spectroscopicanalysis have been carried out to investigate annealing temperature effect on various structural parameters, mole-fraction, phase-content, and optical bandgap of the TiO2 film photoanode. It was observed that depending on annealing temperature, theratio of polymorphs of Degussa P25 changed substantially. For the change in annealing temperature from 350 °C to 600 °C, variations occurred in crystallite size from 11.9 nm to 24.9 nm, strain from 0.006 to 0.014, specific surface area from 62.77 m2·g-1 to 125.74 m2·g-1, morphology index from 0.49 to 0.64, dislocation density from 5 × 1013 line/m2 to 8 × 1015 line/m2, crystallite per unit surface area from 2 × 1013 m-2 to 2.5 × 1014 m-2, and optical bandgap from 2.4 eV to 3.1 eV.
In this work, the impact of six different anti-reflection coating (ARC) layers has been investigated using PC1D simulation software. Simulation shows that the range of 500-700 nm would be suitable for designing an ARC. Designing a single-layer silicon nitride (Si 3 N 4) ARC for 600 nm wavelength and with a thickness of 74.257 nm, a silicon solar cell with 20.35% efficiency has been simulated. Very closely followed by a 20.34% efficient silicon solar cell with 74.87 nm thick zinc oxide (ZnO) ARC layer. Significant increase in efficiency has been observed by applying ARC in respect to not applying any kind of ARC. After efficient solar cell modeling, optimum efficiency of 20.67% is being achieved by using SiO 2 surface passivation and Si 3 N 4 ARC layer. The effects on voltage, current, photovoltaic efficiency, reflectivity and external quantum efficiency due to ARCs are also represented in this work.
Zinc oxide thin films with different thicknesses were prepared on microscopic glass slides by sol-gel spin coating method, then hydrothermal process was applied to produce zinc oxide nanorod arrays. The nanorod thin films were characterized by various spectroscopic methods of analysis. From the images of field emission scanning electron microscope (FESEM), it was observed that for the film thickness up to 200 nm the formed nanorods with wurtzite hexagonal structure were uniformly distributed over the entire surface substrate. From X-ray diffraction analysis it was revealed that the thin films had good polycrystalline nature with highly preferred c-axis orientation along (0 0 2) plane. The optical characterization done by UV-Vis spectrometer showed that all the films had high transparency of 83 % to 96 % in the visible region and sharp cut off at ultraviolet region of electromagnetic spectrum. The band gap of the films decreased as their thickness increased. Energy dispersive X-ray spectroscopy (EDS) showed the presence of zinc and oxygen elements in the films and Fourier transform infrared spectroscopy (FT-IR) revealed the chemical composition of ZnO in the film.
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