Formation of rod-like nanostructure by aggregation of TiO2 nanoparticles with improved performances

Abstract

To improve the performance of titanium dioxide (TiO2)-based devices, many efforts have been made to prepare nanostructures with composite of TiO2 nanoparticles and nanorods. In this work, a novel rod-like TiO2 nanostructure was obtained via a controllable hydrolysis process. Morphology and structure analysis showed that the rod-like nanostructure was a well-aligned aggregate of nearly spherical TiO2 nanoparticles. Rod-like TiO2 nanoparticle aggregates were fabricated on a primary TiO2 nanoparticle-based layer without the use of template, and formed a hierarchical TiO2 composite film together. The photocatalytic activity of the TiO2 film with rod-like nanoparticle aggregates was evaluated by the degradation of methylene blue. The antibacterial activity of fabricated hierarchical TiO2 film was assessed against Staphylococcus aureus. The photoelectrochemical property of this film as the photoanode in assemble dye-sensitized solar cell was also tested. Compared with randomly distributed nanoparticle-based TiO2 film, the hierarchical TiO2 film exhibited improved performance of photocatalysis, antibacterial activity and photoelectric conversion. Keywords. Rod-like nanostructure; aligned nanoparticle aggregates; photocatalytic activity; antibacterial activity; dye-sensitized solar cell.