Abstract
In recent years, much attention has been paid to the development of dye-sensitized solar cells (DSCs) because of their low production cost. In this study, growth of well-aligned single-crystalline ZnO nanowires (NWs) is realized on bare transparent conductive oxide (TCO) glass substrates by one-step thermal evaporation. The highest obtained roughness factor, conversion efficiency and fill factor are around 20, 1.33% and 0.52, respectively. When compared with the reported values from the ZnO photoanodes fabricated via low-temperature process, the achieved fill factor of 0.52 stands relatively high due to the superior crystallinity and the better electron transport pathway of the nanowires fabricated by the high temperature process. With further improvement on the roughness factor, it is foreseeable that the conversion efficiency can be improved by our lately synthesized ultra-long ZnO NWs (around 80 □m in length) and may reach a useful level.