Facile synthesis of ZnO nanobullets/nanoflakes and their applications to dye-sensitized solar cells

▶Although there are many available methods to fabricate ZnO nanostructures, we report here a simple and generalized method to prepare ZnO nanocrystallites from zinc acetates by tuning the volume ratio between water and ethylene glycol. In comparison, this synthetic method is of relatively low cost and is able to readily scaled-up for industrial production. In particular, the ZnO nanostructures were used as active photoanodes after incorporation in sandwich-type dye-sensitized solar cells (DSSCs). The overall solar-to-electric energy conversion efficiencies obtained under air mass (AM) 1.5 conditions, were 1.93% using ZnO nanobullets, while the efficiency was raised up to 3.64% using ZnO nanoflakes.