ZnO nanoarchitectures, including ZnO nanocactus (NC) arrays and ZnO nanosheet (NS)/NW composite arrays, have been constructed by the chemical bath deposition of hierarchical nanostructures on the ZnO nanowire (NW) array at room temperature (RT) using a supersaturated solution of zinc acetate and NaOH.  The same as the ZnO NW, the hierarchical nanostructures, i.e. spine and NS, possess a single crystalline structure.  Using D149-sensitized ZnO nanoarchitectures as the anodes of dye-sensitized solar cells (DSSCs), superior efficiencies are attained compared to the primary ZnO NW DSSCs.  With an anode thickness of 10 �m, an efficiency of 5.37% is achieved in the D149-sensitized ZnO NC DSSC.  Moreover, with an anode thickness of 3 �m, the D149-sensitized ZnO NS/NW DSSC demonstrates the efficiency over 4%.  This work demonstrates that the efficiency of the ZnO NW DSSC can be significantly enhanced simply by the formation of the RT hierarchical nanostructures on the ZnO NW array.

Room-temperature formation of hierarchical nanoarchitectures on ZnO nanowires for solar cells

243rd National Meeting (2012)

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