Simple and low temperature hydrothermal process is employed to synthesize exotic nanostructures of TiO2. The nanostructures are obtained merely by changing the nature of the precursors and processing parameters. The chloride and isopropoxide salts of titanium are used to grow high quality thin films comprising anatase nanocorals, rutile nanorods and rutile nanoflowers respectively. A novel rout...

For conventional dye or quantum dot sensitized solar cells, which are fabricated using mesoporous films, the inefficient electron transport due to defects such as grain boundaries and surface traps is a major drawback. To simultaneously increase the carrier transport efficiency as well as the surface area, optimal-assembling of hierarchical nanostructures is an attractive approach. Here, a thre...

The formation process of titania based nanorods during hydrothermal synthesis starting from an amorphous TiO2.nH2O gel has been investigated. Sodium tri-titanate (Na2Ti3O7) particles with a rodlike morphology were prepared by a simple hydrothermal process in the presence of a concentrated NaOH aqueous solution. The ion exchange reaction of the synthesized Na2Ti3O7 nanorods with HCl under ultras...

In recent years, dye-sensitized solar cells (DSSCs) based on nanocrystalline mesoporous TiO2 films have attracted much attention as a potential low-cost alternative to single or polycrystalline p–n junction silicon solar cells. DSSCs can reach electrical energy conversion efficiencies ≈12% [154, 284]. The traditional mesoporous TiO2 electrode composed of the TiO2 nanoparticles offer insufficien...

TiO2-coated Ag nanorods (Ag@TiO2 NRs) have been fabricated as multifunctional surface-enhanced Raman scattering (SERS) substrates. Uniform TiO2 shells could sufficiently protect the internal Ag NRs against oxidation and sulfuration, thus the temporal stability of SERS substrates was markedly improved. Meanwhile, due to the synergetic effect between crystalline TiO2 and Ag, the nanocomposites co...

     Zinc Oxide (ZnO) nanorods and titanium dioxide (TiO2) nanostructures thin films were prepared onto glass substrates by the chemical bath deposition (CBD) method. The ZnO was structured as nanorods (NRs) while TiO2 was formed as nanoflowers plate as confirmed by Field-Emission Scanning Electron Microscope (FESEM) images. The ZnO/Fe3O4 and TiO2/Fe3O4 nanostructures thin films were prepared v...

A core-shell photoanode, composed of a monoclinic WO3 nanorods core encapsulated with a rutile TiO2 nanoparticles shell, reveals ~246% enhancement in power conversion efficiency due to improved current density and open circuit voltage values and longer-lived charge carriers.

A novel photoanode architecture with plasmonic silver (Ag) nanostructures embedded in titania (TiO2), which served as the wide band gap semiconducting support and CdS quantum dots (QDs), as light absorbers, is presented. Ag nanostructures were prepared by a polyol method and are comprised of clumps of nanorods, 15-35 nm wide, interspersed with globular nanoparticles and they were characterized ...

This article presents a study on the growth process for the template-based growth of TiO2 nanorods by sol electrophoretic deposition, through both experiment and simulation. Uniformly sized nanorods of approximately 45–200 nm in diameter and 10–60 μm in length can be grown over large areas with near unidirectional alignment. The nanorods have the desired stoichiometric chemical composition and ...