An Investigation of the Electrical Properties and Microstructure of Li-Doped ZnO Ceramics

Zinc oxide (ZnO) can be used as the transparent conducting oxide (TCO) in dye-sensitized solar cells (DSSCs) due to its advantages of low cost, high stability, excellent electrical conductivity and transmittance. Especially, rapid progress has been made in the field of flexible-DSSCs. However, due to the poor thermal stability of flexible substrates such as polyethylene-terephtalate (PET) and polyethylene-naphtalate (PEN), low temperature processing conditions have been strongly required for the transparent electrode. We have studied the ZnO to lower sintering temperature in view of material science through the ceramic. In this paper, low temperature sintered ZnO ceramics were fabricated using Li as low sintering aids. The effect of changes in Li concentration (0, 0.01, 0.02, 0.05 wt.%) on the Li doped ZnO ceramics were researched.