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Updated: May 6, 2026
Electrospinning of Photocatalytic Electrodes for Dye-sensitized Solar Cells
Published on: June 28, 2017
Size-tunable TiO2 nanorod microspheres synthesised via a one-pot solvothermal method and used as the scattering layer
Yichuan Rui1, Yaogang Li, Qinghong Zhang
1State Key Laboratory for Modification of Chemical Fibers and Polymer Materials, Donghua University, Shanghai 201620, P. R. China. zhangqh@dhu.edu.cn wanghz@dhu.edu.cn.
Abstract:
TiO2 microspheres assembled by single crystalline rutile TiO2 nanorods were synthesized by one-pot solvothermal treatment at 180 °C based on an aqueous-organic mixture solution containing n-hexane, distilled water, titanium n-butoxide and hydrochloric acid. The spheres had a radiative structure from the center, and their diameters were controlled in the range from 1 to 5 μm by adjusting the volume of the reactant water. Nitrogen adsorption-desorption isotherms showed that all the as-prepared microspheres had relatively high specific surface areas of about 50 m(2) g(-1). The 1 μm sized TiO2 nanorod microspheres were fabricated as a scattering overlayer in DSSCs, leading to a remarkable improvement in the power conversion efficiency: 8.22% of the bi-layer DSSCs versus 7.00% for the reference cell made of a single-layer film prepared from nanocrystalline TiO2. Such improvement was mainly attributed to the enhanced light harvesting and dye loading brought by the effective scattering centers.
