Preparation and Characterization of Pure Rutile TiO2 Nanoparticles for Photocatalytic Study and Thin Films for Dye-Sensitized Solar Cells

Abstract EN

Pure rutile-phase TiO2 (r-TiO2) was synthesized by a simple one pot experiment under hydrothermal condition using titanium (IV) n-butoxide as a Ti-precursor and HCl as a peptizer.

The TiO2 products were characterized by XRD, TEM, ESCA, and BET surface area measurement.

The r-TiO2 were rodlike in shape with average size of ~61×32 nm at hydrothermal temperature of 220°C for 10 h.

Hydrothermal treatment at longer reaction time increased the tendency of crystal growth and also decreased the BET surface area.

The degradation of methylene blue was selected as a test reaction to confer the photocatalytic activity of as-obtained r-TiO2.

The results showed a strong correlation between the structure evolution, particle size, and photocatalytic performance of r-TiO2.

Furthermore, the r-TiO2-based solar cell was prepared for the photovoltaic characteristics study, and the best efficiency of ~3.16% was obtained.