Effect of Randomly Grown Morphology of ZnO Nanorods in Inverted Organic Solar Cells

Muhammad Zafar; Shenawar Ali Khan; Fatima Sher; Muddassir Ali; Tareq Manzoor; Sheik Abdur Rahman; Woo Young Kim; Mahmood Saleem; Do-Heyoung Kim

doi:10.1166/jnn.2020.17542

Effect of Randomly Grown Morphology of ZnO Nanorods in Inverted Organic Solar Cells

J Nanosci Nanotechnol. 2020 Jul 1;20(7):4414-4418. doi: 10.1166/jnn.2020.17542.

Authors

Muhammad Zafar¹, Shenawar Ali Khan², Fatima Sher³, Muddassir Ali⁴, Tareq Manzoor⁵, Sheik Abdur Rahman², Woo Young Kim², Mahmood Saleem¹, Do-Heyoung Kim⁶

Affiliations

¹ Center for Coal Technology, University of the Punjab, Lahore, 54590, Pakistan.
² Department of Electronic Engineering, Jeju National University, Jeju, 63243, Republic of Korea.
³ School of Architecture, University of Lahore, Lahore, 54000, Pakistan.
⁴ Department of Energy Engineering, University of Engineering and Technology, Taxila, 47050, Pakistan.
⁵ Faculty of Engineering, COMSATS Institute of Information Technology, Lahore, 54000, Pakistan.
⁶ School of Chemical Engineering, Chonnam National University, Gwangju, 61186, Republic of Korea.

PMID: 31968486
DOI: 10.1166/jnn.2020.17542

Abstract

Here, we analyzed the photovoltaic properties of the inverted organic solar cells (IOSCs) by using randomly oriented medium density ZnO nanorods (ZnO-NR) synthesized hydrothermally at low temperature conditions to avoid morphological defects. The IOSC with ZnO-NR (length < 150 nm) of medium density and random orientation showed an improvement of 83% in power conversion efficiency compared to the cell with (length < 20 nm) hydrothermally grown ZnO-NR. The optimized hydrothermal growth conditions for ZnO-NR enhanced the photovoltaic performance indicators by reducing recombination rate evidenced by the photovoltaic data. The qualitative elemental analysis of the ZnO-NR based interface was performed by the EDX, which confirmed that the as-grown ZnO-NR contain the Zn and O elements.