Synthesis Of Single Crystal TiO₂Nanowires And Their Application In Solar Cells

According to its relatively simple fabrication process, low fabrication cost, higherphoto-electricity conversation efficiency and shorter power pay-back, the dye-sensitized solarcell has been getting more and more consideration of research groups around the world sincethe significant breakthrough in the efficiency that Michael Gr tzel and Brian O’Regancontributed in1991. It shows that the film based on TiO₂nanoparticle has a suppression onelectron transport, photogenerated electrons may undertake a random walk through themesoporous nanoparticle film and experience a million trapping and detrapping events in thecontact region between nanoparticles which lead to a lower electron harvesting efficiency,resulting in poor cell characters. On the contrary, one dimension nano-structures such asnanowires, nanotubes, nanorods, get great research interest due to their relatively obviousadvantages on electron transport. Different from the common route to synthesize onedimension nanowires by hydrothermal methods, this paper synthesized the single anataseTiO₂nanowires in one facile step successfully. On the synthesis of the one dimension TiO₂nanowires, the change of concentration of solvent, reacting time and reacting temperature,were also regulated to discuss the influence of the parameters on the formation of TiO₂nanowires, respectively. Depending on the evolution of reacting time, a growth mechanismcontrolled by a dissolution-recrystallization process has been proposed for formation ofanatase TiO₂nanowires. An overall power conversion efficiency of7.10%has been achievedby using these anatase TiO₂nanowires, significantly higher than that derived from P25nanoparticles （5.57%）, conforming the advantages of one dimension nanowires on electrontransport.