On Oct. 14, 2014, Prof. Bin Liu from School of Chemical and Biomedical Engineering, Nanyang Technological University, Singapore, visit SINANO and delivered a talk entitled “Titanium Dioxide Nanostructures for Solar Energy Harvesting”. The presentation was chaired by Prof. Liwei Chen, the deputy director of SINANO. Researchers and graduated students attended the lecture. 

Titanium dioxide (TiO2) is one of the most widely used semiconductors in photovoltaics and photocatalysis because it is nontoxic, abundant, stable and photoactive. However, the wide bandgap, low electron mobility and short minority carrier diffusion length of TiO2 limit its quantum efficiency in the optoelectronics applications. Prof. Liu presented recent progress of his group by using a solution chemical approach for preparing rutile phase and anatase phase TiO2 nanostructures in several substrates, for improving the performance of TiO2 in dye-sensitized solar cells (DSSCs), photoelectrochemical cells (PEC) and photocatalysis. Comparing performance of rutile phase and anatase phase TiO2 nanostructure based devices, it shows that surface/interface properties of TiO2 nanostructure are extremely important factors for high efficiency device, rather than bulk properties. Thorough discussion on the impressive results was carried out after presentation.