Regular Article

Photovoltaic performance of P3HT-porphyrin functionalized 1D CdS nanostructured organic inorganic bulk heterojunction hybrid solar cells^*

¹ Department of Chemistry, Quaid-e Azam University Islamabad, 45320, Pakistan
² Department of Chemistry and Physics, Queen’s University, Kingston, K7L 5C4 Ontario, Canada
³ Department of General and Inorganic Chemistry, University of Pardubice, 53210, Czech Republic

^a e-mail: dineshpathak80@gmail.com
^b e-mail: nunzim@queensu.ca

Received: 23 December 2016
Revised: 19 February 2017
Accepted: 6 March 2017
Published online: 12 May 2017

Abstract

Here we report first time the direct observation of the nucleation and growth process of cadmium sulfide (CdS) nanowires by stirring of CdS nanoparticles. The growth process of CdS nanowires consist of three steps, the growth of CdS particles, nucleation of CdS nanorods and finally the growth of CdS nanowires. This method brings forward a new idea to synthesize nanowires. The X-ray diffraction (XRD), scanning electron microscopy (SEM), energy dispersive X-ray (EDAX), ultraviolet-visible (UV-Vis) and photoluminescence (PL) spectra have been provided for the characterization of the as-obtained nanowires. Furthermore, carboxylic functionalize porphyrin was examined as sensitizer for CdS nanowires. The interaction of porphyrin with CdS nanowires was investigated by absorption, infrared, steady state fluorescence spectroscopy and SEM techniques. The hybrid devices were fabricated with organic polymer with different concentration of dyes and the device with optimum concentration 6 × 10^-6 M shows the highest efficiency of 0.5% with short-circuit current density 3.10 mA cm^-2, open-circuit voltage 0.44 V and fill factor 0.37.