Hydrothermally grown ZnO nanoflowers for environmental remediation and clean energy applications

Well-crystalline flower-shaped ZnO nanostructures were synthesized by simple hydrothermal process at low-temperature of 145 °C and utilized as a photocatalyst and photo-anode material for photocatalytic degradation and dye-sensitized solar cell applications, respectively. The detailed morphological and the structural characterizations revealed that the synthesized products were flower-shaped, grown in very high-density, and possessed well-crystalline wurtzite hexagonal phase. The chemical composition confirmed the pure phase and good optical properties of as-synthesized ZnO flowers. The as-synthesized ZnO flowers were used as an efficient photocatalyst for the photocatalytic degradation of Rhodamine B which exhibit ∼84% degradation within 140 min. Moreover, the as-synthesized ZnO flowers were utilized as photo-anode material for the fabrication of dye-sensitized solar cells (DSSCs) which exhibited overall light-to-electricity conversion efficiency of ∼1.38%, open-circuit current (VOC) of 0.621 V, short-circuit current (JSC) of ∼3.52 mA/cm2 and fill factor (FF) of 0.64.