Swift sol–gel synthesis of mesoporous anatase-rich TiO₂ aggregates via microwave and a lyophilization approach for improved light scattering in DSSCs

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• 作者：Dhavakumar N. Joshi ; S. Sudhakar ; Radhika V. Nair…
• 刊名：Journal of Materials Science
• 出版年：2017
• 出版时间：February 2017
• 年：2017
• 卷：52
• 期：4
• 页码：2308-2318
• 全文大小：
• 刊物类别：Chemistry and Materials Science
• 刊物主题：Materials Science, general; Characterization and Evaluation of Materials; Polymer Sciences; Continuum Mechanics and Mechanics of Materials; Crystallography and Scattering Methods; Classical Mechanics;
• 出版者：Springer US
• ISSN：1573-4803
• 卷排序：52

文摘

TiO₂ aggregates (TAs) were prepared via combination of facile ‘microwave assisted sol–gel synthesis’ and ‘lyophilization based extraction.’ The rapid hydrolysis followed by peptization of titanium iso-propoxide was carried out under microwave irradiation to form TiO₂ hydrosol at temperature as low as 90 °C in just 10 min. Further, lyophilization of the as-synthesized TiO₂ hydrosol resulted in the formation of loosely packed TAs. The X-ray diffraction and Raman analysis confirmed the crystallinity of TAs with predominant anatase phase. The transmission electron microscopy images of TAs revealed the interlinked aggregated structure of ~10-nm-sized TiO₂ nanoparticles. The scanning electron microscopy images further confirmed the agglomerated structure of TAs with the size ranging from 500 to 1000 nm, which composed of several TiO₂ nanoparticles. In addition, the Brunauer–Emmett–Teller (BET) analysis of TAs revealed its mesoporous structure and high specific surface area of 95 m2/g. The photoanode films fabricated with TAs proved for its better dye intake and superior light scattering owing to its high surface area and comparable size with incident wavelength, respectively, which in turn significantly improves the light-harvesting ability. In comparison with standard P25 nanoparticle-based DSSCs, short circuit photocurrent density (J_sc) and photoconversion efficiency of TA-based DSSCs showed improvement up to ~35 % under simulated AM1.5 G illumination (100 mW/cm2).