Synthesis, structural and optical properties of ZnO Nano-rods used in Solar Cells fabrication

Abstract

Sudan has vast areas of fertile land, abundance of minerals, water, winds and sunshine, many types of these energies become a valid option. However, in this research, the focus shall only be concern-ing one type of renewable energy, which is solar energy. The conventional solar cells are mainly made up of doped silicon electrodes. Their major task is to convert visible light to electrical energy according to the photovoltaic (PV) conversion method. However the production of these crystalline silicon solar cells is very complicated and expensive. Therefore the aim of this research is to produce ZnO nano-rods with optimum characteristics that can be used in the construction of low-cost solar cells. Zinc Oxide (ZnO) nano-rods in powder form were synthesized using the hydrothermal method, which is a simple and inexpensive method. The refinement of X-Ray dif-fraction (XRD) pattern was used to find and investigate the structural properties of the nano-rods. The morphology and size of the ZnO nano-rods were determined by a Transmission Electron Mi-croscope (TEM), while the EDX studies confirmed the formation of ZnO functional group. The optical band gap energy was obtained using both UV-VIS-NIR diffuse reflectance and absortion spectroscopy also photo-luminesces (PL) was used