Effect of incorporation of reduced graphene oxide on ZnO-based dye-sensitized solar cells

• A facile method is reported to improve the cell performance of ZnO-based DSSC.
• Incorporating different amount of rGO into ZnO could improve the cell performance.
• The cell performace could be improved due to rGO-ZnO Schottky barrier junction.

Here, we demonstrate a facile method to improve the cell performance of ZnO-based dye sensitized solar cell by incorporating different amount of reduced graphene oxide (rGO). Overall photo-to-current conversion-efficiency (PCE) of the device 3 with 0.75 mL rGO exhibits a 1.3 times improvement compared to bare ZnO. The electrochemical impedance spectroscopy (EIS) measurements show that the enhancement could be attributed to the improvement of electron transport/injection and the decrease of the charge recombination in the device, which arise from the formation of rGO-based Schottky junction in ZnO-photoanode.

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