A novel maskless approach towards aligned, density modulated and multi-junction ZnO nanowires for enhanced surface area and light trapping solar cells

Abstract

A maskless method of employing polymer growth inhibitor layers is used to modulate the conflicting parameters of density and alignment of multi-junction nanowires via large-scale low temperature chemical route. This low temperature chemical route is shown to synthesize multi-junction nanostructures without compromising the crystal quality at the interfaces. The final morphology of optimized multi-junctions nanowire arrays can be demonstrated on various substrates due to substrate independence and low temperature processing. Here, we also fabricated devices based on density modulated multi-junction nanowires tuned to infiltrate nanoparticles. The fabrication of hierarchically structured nanowire/nanoparticles composites presents an advantageous structure, one that allows nanoparticles to provide large surface areas for dye adsorption, whilst the nanowires can enhance the light harvesting, electron transport rate, and also the mechanical properties of the films. This work can be of great scientific and commercial interest since the technique employed is of low temperature (<90 degrees C) and economical for large-scale solution processing, much valued in today's flexible display and photovoltaic industries.

Principal processes of organic-inorganic hybrid solar cells using the example of ZnPc with ZnO

“…The efficiency is <0.1%, which is remarkably lower than those reported in literature for other ZnO‐NW‐based solar cells , most probably due to the fact that we use non‐optimized ZnO‐NWs only.…”

The Effect of Sodium Dodecyl Sulfate (SDS) and Cetyltrimethylammonium Bromide (CTAB) on the Properties of ZnO Synthesized by Hydrothermal Method

“…Recently, there have been lots of works on the synthesis of ZnO nanostructures using different surfactants like ethylenediaminetetraacetic acid (EDTA) [11], sodium dodecyl sulfate (SDS) [12], cetyltrimethylammonium bromide (CTAB) [13], polyethylene glycol (PEG) [14] and polyethyleneimine (PEI) [15,16]. These studies mostly investigated the effect of surfactants on the morphology of ZnO crystals separately.…”

Optimization of dye adsorption time and film thickness for efficient ZnO dye-sensitized solar cells with high at-rest stability

“…This figure also shows that the ZnO particles in the film have two sizes: most are approximately 20 nm in diameter, whereas some are rod-shaped and have an average dimension of 200 × 500 nm. Because of their sizes, these rod-shaped particles can serve as light scatterers in the visible region of incident light, enhancing light harvesting in the resulting device [14,15,22]. …”