Effect of ZnO nanostructures on the performance of dye sensitized solar cells

[Display omitted] •ZnO nanostructures were synthesized by employing different solvating conditions.•Improved aspect ratio obtained in organic solvent compared to aqueous/dual solvent.•Enhanced transmittance and dye adsorption of nanorice is due to smaller size.•Nanorice being 1D structure shown fast electron flow resulting higher conductivity.•Nanorice photoanode imparted enhanced performance for DSSCs with efficiency of 2.1%. Development of cost effective and easily scalable energy systems for harvesting renewable solar energy is attractive proposal for future. This work presents facile synthesis of ZnO nanostructures with different morphologies simply providing different solvating conditions in a hydrothermal process, for their subsequent use in dye sensitized solar cell (DSSC) device. ZnO nanoprisms were obtained in aqueous solution where addition of methanol/ethanol resulted in formation of hollow nanoprism while methanol in alkaline solution yield ZnO nanorice morphology. The obtained nanostructures were characterized for structural, morphological, elemental, optical and surface area analysis. Then devices were fabricated using the grown nanostructure and tested their response under 1 sun conditions for dye sensitized solar cells with N719 dye-loading. Among different nanostructure morphologies, ZnO nonorice showed superior performance reaching the maximum conversion efficiency. We attribute this to large surface area, better conductivity, and enhanced dye adsorption of nanorice in comparison to other synthesized ZnO nanostructures.