ZnO Balls Made of Intermingled Nanocrystalline Nanosheets for Photovoltaic Device Application

Well-crystalline ZnO balls made of intermingled nanocrystalline nanosheets were synthesized by facile hydrothermal process using zinc nitrate hexahydrate, hydroxylamine hydrochloride and sodium hydroxide. The prepared ZnO balls were examined using several techniques in terms of their morphological, structural, compositional, optical and photovoltaic properties. The detailed morphological studies revealed that the synthesized material possessed ball-shaped morphologies which were made of intermingled nanocrystalline nanosheets. The detailed compositional, structural and optical properties confirmed that the synthesized material was pure ZnO and possessed well-crystalline wurtzite hexagonal phase and exhibited good optical properties. The assynthesized ZnO balls were used as photo-anode materials to fabricate efficient dye sensitized solar cells (DSSCs). The fabricated DSSCs exhibited an overall light-to-electricity conversion efficiency of 2.1% with a short-circuit current of 6.28 mA/cm(2), open-circuit voltage of 0.659 V and fill factor of 0.51. The obtained results revealed that simply synthesized ZnO nanomaterials can efficiently be used for the fabrication of high-efficient dye-sensitized solar cell applications.