Hedgehog-like hierarchical ZnO needle-clusters with superior electron transfer kinetics for dye-sensitized solar cells

Abstract

Owing to their unique morphology, hedgehog-like ZnO needle-clusters show enhanced photovoltaic conversion efficiencies and superior electron transfer kinetics: fast electron transfer and long lifetimes with suppressed recombination.

Hierarchical ZnO with twinned structure: Morphology evolution, formation mechanism and properties

“…Recently, hierarchical ZnO have attracted considerable attention because they combine the features of micrometer and nanometer scale building blocks and can provide more chances for exploring novel properties and superior device performances [8]. As a result, a variety of hierarchical ZnO structures with different morphologies and dimensions have been successfully constructed, including nanoforest [9], nanotree [10], hedgehog-like ZnO [11], and flower-like microspheres [7], etc. Among these structures, hierarchical nanoforest and nanotree possess high light-conversion efficiency due to their enhanced surface area.…”

Triple-shell NiO hollow sphere for p-type dye-sensitized solar cell with superior light harvesting

“…Recently, dye-sensitized solar cells (DSSCs) are receiving increasing attention because of their potential for a low cost and high efficient energy conversion (Grätzel, 2001;Mansha et al, 2019;Naveen Kumar et al, 2020;Qu et al, 2010;Qu et al, 2014;Xi et al, 2016;Xi et al, 2019). One of the new concepts for DSSC that holds great potential is the p-n tandem design, which uses an n-DSSC (photoanode sensitized) and a p-DSSC (photocathode sensitized) (Jianjun Nattestad et al, 2010) stacked in series.…”

Effect of Ni doping on the photovoltaic conversion efficiency of ZnO nanostructured dye sensitized solar cells

“…Many of the oxide materials like ZnO, SnO 2 , MoO 2 , NiO and TiO 2 have been investigated for dye sensitized solar cells. Among them ZnO is an important functional photoelectrode material for dye sensitized solar cells because of its direct energy band gap 3.37 eV, exciton binding energy (60 meV) and availability in different morphological structures [5][6][7][8]. Bulk ZnO is an insulator but shows semiconductor behavior at nanoscale.…”