Fabrication of green dye-sensitized solar cell based on ZnO nanoparticles as a photoanode and graphene quantum dots as a photo-sensitizer

Golnoush Zamiri; Samira Bagheri

doi:10.1016/j.jcis.2017.10.026

Fabrication of green dye-sensitized solar cell based on ZnO nanoparticles as a photoanode and graphene quantum dots as a photo-sensitizer

J Colloid Interface Sci. 2018 Feb 1:511:318-324. doi: 10.1016/j.jcis.2017.10.026. Epub 2017 Oct 7.

Authors

Golnoush Zamiri¹, Samira Bagheri²

Affiliations

¹ Nanotechnology & Catalysis Research Centre (NANOCAT), IPS Building, University of Malaya, 50603 Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia.
² Nanotechnology & Catalysis Research Centre (NANOCAT), IPS Building, University of Malaya, 50603 Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia. Electronic address: samira_bagheri@um.edu.my.

PMID: 29031151
DOI: 10.1016/j.jcis.2017.10.026

Abstract

Zero-dimensional graphene quantum dots (GQDs) consist of single- or few-layer graphene with a size less than 20 nm and stand for a new type of QDs with unique properties combining the graphene nature and size-resulted quantum effects. GQDs possess unique optical and electronic properties, and in particular possess a band-gap less than 2.0 eV because of quantum confinement and edge effects. In this study, we investigated the performance of DSSCs using different thicknesses of ZnO nanoparticles as a photo-anode and GQDs as a green photosensitizer. The current voltage (I-V) test results indicate that the performance of DSSCs is improved by increasing the thickness of the photo-anode and the thickness of 40 μm shows the highest efficiency for DSSC device based on ZnO nanoparticles photo-anodes. The DSSC using ZnO nanoparticles as a photo-anode with thickness of 40 μm shows almost same efficiency when we replaced N-719 with GQDs which is confirmed that using GQDs as an alternative to ruthenium based dyes is a new approach for DSSCs.

Keywords: Dye-densitized solar cell; Graphene quantum dots; Green photosensitizer; Solar cell fabrication.