Physicochemical and photo-electrochemical characterization of novel N-doped nanocomposite ZrO2/TiO2 photoanode towards technology of dye-sensitized solar cells

This work introduces the synthesis of N-doped nanocomposite of ZrO₂/TiO₂ nanofibers (NFs) by use of both electrospinning and hydrothermal methods. The physicochemical properties of the introduced TiO₂ NFs are investigated to describe the morphology, crystallinity and chemistry through FESEM, SEM-EDX, XRD, TEM and XPS. As the results, the investigated material can be described as N@ZrO₂/TiO₂ NFs. The crystal structure of the prepared TiO₂ is only anatase structure. Then, the novel NFs are utilized to design novel photoanode and photo-electrochemical characterization such as current-potential response under light, incident photon-to-current efficiency (IPCE) and electrochemical impedance spectroscopy (EIS) of the dye-sensitized solar cell (DSC) are also investigated. The photovoltaic response showed that the efficiency of the DSCs employed N@ZrO₂/TiO₂ photoanode gave 4.95%, which was …