Zinc-aluminum oxide solid solution nanosheets obtained by pyrolysis of layered double hydroxide as the photoanodes for dye-sensitized solar cells.

Due to the superiority of metal-doped ZnO compared to TiO2, the Zn-M (M = Al3+, Ga3+, Cr3+, Ti4+, Ce4+) mixed metal oxide solid solutions have been extensively studied for photocatalytic and photovoltaic applications. In this work, a systematic research has proceeded for the preparation of a zinc-aluminum oxide semiconductor as a photoanode for the dye-sensitized solar cells (DSSCs) by a simple pyrolysis route with the Zn-Al layered double hydroxide (LDH) as a precursor. The Zn–Al oxide solid solution has been applied for DSSCs as an electron acceptor, which is used to study the influence of different Al content and sintering temperature on the device efficiency. Finally, the Zn-Al oxide solid solution with calcination temperature 600 °C and Al 27 at.% content exhibits the best performance. The photoelectric efficiency improved 100 times when the Al3+ content decreased from 44 to 27 at.%. The ZnxAlyO solid solution show a reasonable efficiency as photoanode materials in DSSCs, with the best preliminary performance reported so far, and shows its potential application for the photovoltaic devices.