Solvothermal Synthesis of Hierarchical TiO₂ Microstructures with High Crystallinity and Superior Light Scattering for...

In this article, hierarchical TiO₂ microstructures (HM-TiO₂) were synthesized by a simple solvothermal method adopting tetra-n-butyl titanate as the titanium source in a mixed solvent composed of N,N-dimethylformamide and acetic acid. Due to the high crystallinity and superior light-scattering ability, the resultant HM-TiO₂ are advantageous as photoanodes for dye-sensitized solar cells. When assembled to the entire photovoltaic device with C101 dye as a sensitizer, the pure HM-TiO₂-based solar cells showed an ultrahigh photovoltage up to 0.853 V. Finally, by employing the as-obtained HM-TiO₂ as the scattering layer and optimizing the architecture of dye-sensitized solar cells, both higher photovoltage and incident photon-to-electron conversion efficiency value were harvested with respect to TiO₂ nanoparticles-based dye-sensitized solar cells, resulting in a high power conversion efficiency of 9.79%. This work provides a promising strategy to develop photoanode materials with outstanding photoelectric conversion performance.