Niobium doped zinc oxide nanorods as an electron transport layer for high-performance inverted polymer solar cells

Hina Naz; Rai Nauman Ali; Qing Liu; Shangfeng Yang; Bin Xiang

doi:10.1016/j.jcis.2017.10.041

Niobium doped zinc oxide nanorods as an electron transport layer for high-performance inverted polymer solar cells

J Colloid Interface Sci. 2018 Feb 15:512:548-554. doi: 10.1016/j.jcis.2017.10.041. Epub 2017 Oct 26.

Authors

Hina Naz¹, Rai Nauman Ali², Qing Liu¹, Shangfeng Yang¹, Bin Xiang¹

Affiliations

¹ Department of Materials Science & Engineering, CAS Key Lab of Materials for Energy Conversion, Synergetic Innovation Center of Quantum Information & Quantum Physics, University of Science and Technology of China, Hefei, Anhui 230026, China.
² Department of Materials Science & Engineering, CAS Key Lab of Materials for Energy Conversion, Synergetic Innovation Center of Quantum Information & Quantum Physics, University of Science and Technology of China, Hefei, Anhui 230026, China. Electronic address: nauman@mail.ustc.edu.cn.

PMID: 29100159
DOI: 10.1016/j.jcis.2017.10.041

Abstract

The wet chemical synthesis, characterization and applications of Nb doped ZnO nanorods in bulk heterojunction inverted polymer solar cells are presented in this paper. Zn_1-xNb_xO with x ranging from 0.01 to 0.07 were successfully synthesized using a novel facile solution-processed wet chemical method. The structural and optical properties of the undoped and Nb doped ZnO nanorods were investigated by transmission electron microscopy, X-ray diffraction, UV-visible near infrared, and photoluminescence (PL) spectroscopies. A clear red shift was observed in the absorption spectra of Nb doped samples compared to the undoped ZnO nanorods. The defect emission peak in the PL spectrum of the Nb doped nanorods completely disappeared at the highest dopant concentration of x=0.07. These undoped and Nb doped ZnO nanorods, in amalgamation with PTB7-Th:PC₇₁BM, were used in the inverted polymer solar cells as an electron transport layer which gives better power conversion efficiencies compared to the pure nanorods.

Keywords: Defect emission; Nanorods; Zinc oxide.