Electrochemically grown ZnO nanorods for hybrid solar cell applications

A hybrid solar cell is designed and proposed as a feasible and reasonable alternative, according to acquired efficiency with the employment of zinc oxide (ZnO) nanorods and ZnO thin films at the same time. Both of these ZnO structures were grown electrochemically and poly(3-hexylthiophene):phenyl-C61-butyric acid methyl ester; (P3HT:PCBM) was used as an active polymer blend, which was found to be compatible to prepared indium-tin-oxide (ITO) substrate base. This ITO base was introduced with mentioned ZnO structure in such a way that, the most efficient configuration was optimized to be ITO/ZnO film/ZnO nanorod/P3HT: PCBM/Ag. Efficiency of this optimized device is found to be 2.44%. All ZnO works were carried out electrochemically, that is indeed for the first time and at relatively lower temperatures. (C) 2009 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.