LAUSR

Abstract This work introduces the synthesis of N-doped nanocomposite of ZrO 2 /TiO 2 nanofibers (NFs) by use of both electrospinning and hydrothermal methods. The physicochemical properties of the introduced TiO 2 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@ZrO 2 /TiO 2 NFs. The crystal structure of the prepared TiO 2 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@ZrO 2 /TiO 2 photoanode gave 4.95%, which was higher than those of DSCs designed with ZrO 2 /TiO 2 NFs (4.51%) and N@TiO 2 NFs (4.41%) photoanodes. The high photo-response of DSC by use of N@ZrO 2 /TiO 2 NFs can be attributed to enhanced electrical conductivity, which is studied via EIS, and presence of active sites of N. These active sites can easily absorb dye-molecules in the step of dye-loading in the fabrication of DSC.