Photoelectrochemical property of CdS and PbS cosensitized on the TiO2 array by novel successive ionic layer adsorption and reaction method

TiO 2 film materials have very wide applications in photovoltaic conversion techniques. And, TiO 2 nanotubes array film with nanowires directly formed on top (denoted as TiO 2 NTWs) was prepared by the anodization method. CdS and PbS quantum dots (QDs) were firstly cosensitized on the TiO 2 NTWs array (denoted as (CdS   +   PbS)/TiO 2 NTWs) by novel successive ionic layer adsorption and reaction (N-SILAR), which only needed a cation mixed solution containing Cd 2+ and Pb 2+ and an anionic solution containing S 2− . This N-SILAR method can not only effectively shorten the experimental time, simplify the experiment procedure and reduce the experiment cost, but also make the material of (CdS   +   PbS)/TiO 2 NTWs possess the advantages of improving electron transport and reducing chemical erosion. Moreover, the photocurrent of (CdS   +   PbS)/TiO 2 NTWs was 4.1   mA/cm 2 under an illumination of 100   mW/cm 2 . The most eye-popping part was that the result was 8 times higher than that of the bare TiO 2 NTWs array. The result of photoelectrochemical measurements indicated that this novel material had a potential application in photovoltaic devices.