Journal of Material Sciences & Engineering

Fabrication of Length Tunable ZnO Nanowire Arrays and Investigation on Their Effect for Dye-Sensitized Solar Cells

Abstract

Meili Wang and Yan Wang

A series of ZnO nanowire arrays were grown on seeded fluorine-doped tin oxide (FTO) substrates by hydrothermal method. The effect of reaction solution concentration on the length and morphology of ZnO nanowire arrays, as well as cell performance in dye-sensitized solar cell (DSSC) was investigated. It was found that with the increase of growth solution concentration, the ZnO nanowires became longer in length, but with the bottom of nanowires gradually interconnected to each other. The enlarged ZnO nanowire length lead to increased power conversion efficiency and achieved the highest efficiency of 1.54% with nanowire length of 8.6 μm; however, the further increased nanowire length and connected bottoms of nanowires restrained the further efficiency improvement due to the increased electron recombination and reduced surface area.