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Water splitting is an important technique to store solar energy in the simple form of chemical energy, such as hydrogen. Strontium titanate (SrTiO3) is one of the most promising photocatalysts to produce hydrogen gas from water splitting. In this research, an electrospinning technique in combination with sol-gel method was developed to synthesize 3D porous SrTiO3 nanostructures. Different crystallite sizes of SrTiO3-nanofibers (STO-NFs) were produced by varying the synthesis parameters including precursor concentration and calcination temperature. The synthesized nanofibers were characterized using DSC, TGA, XRD, SEM, and TEM. The crystallite size of STO-NFs decreases with increasing precursor concentration (3.03–15.78 vol.%) and gradually increases as the calcination temperature increases within the range of 600–800 °C. The photocatalytic activity of different STO-NFs (based on crystallite size) was also evaluated by the amount of H2 production from water splitting under UV irradiation. The H2 evolution study demonstrated that the photocatalytic activity of the STO-NFs strongly depends on the crystallite size of the nanofibers, precursor concentration, and calcination temperature. The H2 production rate increases with increasing crystallite size and temperature, whereas it decreases with increasing precursor concentration. The photocatalytic performance of the STO-NFs was also compared with the commercial SrTiO3 nanoparticles (STO-NPs) after Pt addition as a cocatalyst, where the synthesized nanofibers showed 2 times higher H2 production rate (1.14 mmol/g-h) than that of the nanoparticles. This synthesis technique provides a good example to produce other inorganic photocatalytic 3D porous structure materials.

This study focuses on understanding the fundamentals of energy transfer and electron transport in photovoltaic devices with uniquely designed nanostructures by analysing energy transfer in purple photosynthetic bacteria using dye-sensitised solar cell systems. Forster resonance energy transfer between the xanthene dye (donor of energy) and a new polymethine dye (acceptor of energy) was studied in dye-sensitised solar cells, which leads to a doubling of energy conversion efficiency in comparison to the cell with only the polymethine dye. The electron transport in the two different nanostructures of zinc oxide (nanorods and nanosheets) was investigated by spectroscopic methods (UV-vis spectrometer, time-resolved photoluminescence spectroscopy) and electrochemical potentiostat methods. The nanosheet structure of zinc oxide showed high short circuit current and long diffusion length. This fundamental study will lead to efficient artificial photosystem designs.

In this study, a unique approach was developed to synthesize 1-D core-shell nanofibers of carbon nanotubes (CNTs) and TiO2 using combination of coaxial electrospinning and sol-gel technique. Diameters of the fabricated core-shell single wall carbon nanotube-TiO2 (SWCNT-TiO2) and multi wall carbon nanotube-TiO2 (MWCNT-TiO2) nano-composite fibers were between 50-100nm. Energy dispersive spectroscopy (EDS) and X-ray photon spectroscopy (XPS) were applied to confirm encapsulation of carbon nanotube (CNT) in the core-shell structure. Electron transport properties of both SWCNT-TiO2 and MWCNT-TiO2 in the Dye-sensitized solar cells (DSSCs) were studied for the first time. It was found that SWCNT-TiO2 based DSSC provided higher short circuit current relative to MWCNT-TiO2, which was explained by I-V and bode plots. These findings were further illustrated by semi-conductive properties of SWCNT.