Abstract
Various ZnO materials with shapes of micro-flower, nanosheet and hexagonal nanoplate were synthesized by simple solution process and utilized for scattering layer in a novel dye-sensitized solar cell. All synthesized ZnO structures possessed high purity crystalline wurtzite structures
grown in the (001) direction with the size ranges from micrometer to nanometer. The light harvesting efficiency was substantially increased due to enhanced light scattering effects of structural shapes, resulting in power conversion efficiency (η) of 5.57% with ZnO hexagonal nanoplates,
i.e., ∼13.53% improvement over the cell without the ZnO structures (η = 4.90%).