A microscopic and macroscopic investigation of the adsorption of N719 dye on ZnO nanopowders (ZNP) and ZnO nanorods (ZNR) for dye sensitized solar cells using statistical physics treatment and DFT simulation.

In this paper, three adsorption isotherms of N719 dye on two different adsorbents, ZnO nanopowder and ZnO nanorods, at three different thicknesses have been fitted using a monolayer model with three types of receptor sites treated by statistical physics. The model involved parameters are: three coefficients ( , and ) indicating the numbers of adsorbed dye molecules per site, three parameters ( , and ) indicating the receptor site densities and three adsorption energies ((- ), (- ) and (- )). The evolution of these parameters in relation with thickness of ZnO was discussed.