In recent years, mesostructured materials with hollow structure have attracted much attention because of their special physical and chemical properties with respect to solid materials, which are potentially applicable in photocatalysis, drug delivery, energy conversion and storage systems, chemical sensors, biotechnology, and so on. Herein, we report a simple and general synthesis of multiple-shell hollow microspheres such as a-Fe2O3, Co3O4, NiO, CuO, ZnO, SnO2 and ZnFe2O4, with single, binary metal oxides, even heterogeneous shell compositions by using carbonaceous microsphere as template. To our knowledge, this is the first report that the synthesis method for fabricating multiple-shell hollow microsphere could be applied to more than one kind metal oxide and the number and size of shells were also tunable. Moreover, the structural effect of ZnO hollow microspheres on the energy conversion efficiency is investigated in detail when they are used as photoanodes in DSSCs. We demonstrate that, except for increasing the number of shells, manipulating the inter-shell spacing can remarkably improve the energy conversion efficiency. This is especially true for quadruple-shelled ZnO hollow microspheres with close double shells in the exterior and double-shelled hollow core. These have large surface area and the ability to reflect and scatter light and thus show a high energy conversion efficiency of 5.6%. This work may open up new opportunities for fabricating high efficiency DSSCs based on structural design and manipulation of hollow microspheres.

Controllable synthesis of multishelled metal oxide hollow microsphere for high efficient dye-sensitized solar cells

246th National Meeting (2013)

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