Preparation And Performance Of Porous Tio₂ Thin Film

The application of TiO₂ on photocatalysis and dye-sensitized solar cells (DSC) has attracted wide attention recently. In this paper, we used polystyrene spheres as template to prepare porous TiO₂ thin film and made a further surface-modification by Cu₂O. The structure and photocatalysis properties were investigated. We also prepared porous TiO₂ thin film electrode through screen-printing and studied the structure of photoanode and the impact of the surface modification on the performance of the DSC. The details were as follow.The photocatalysis tests were made under different illuminant irradiation to compare the photodegradation efficiency of different TiO₂ thin films. The results showed that the photodegradation efficiency of the porous TiO₂ thin film enhanced with increase of the thickness of the film, but the films without holes were opposite. It was also found that the Cu₂O surface-modification improved the photodegradation efficiency of porous TiO₂ thin film under the simulated sunlight, while decreased the efficiency under the UV light.The surface morphology and the impacts of TiCl₄ treatment, thickness and metallic ion doping on the DSC properties were invesitigated. The results show that the structure of porous TiO₂ thin film electrode is beneficial to dye adsorption and electronic transmissions and its light-to-electricity energy conversion efficiency is superior to P25. It was also found that chemical treatments of titanium tetrachloride on the electrodes can improve its microstructure and increase its photocurrent. We found that the best thickness of the film is 12.1μm. We also found that compounds doped Ca²⁺,Mg²⁺,Zn²⁺,Sn⁴⁺ can improve the photoelectric performance of DSC.