Hierarchical Anodic TiO2 Nanostructures Formed in Ethylene Glycol/o‐H3PO4 Electrolytes for Direct Photocatalysis.

In this work, we describe a simple anodization process of titanium in a hot phosphoric acid/ethylene glycol electrolyte that forms a hierarchically structured photocatalytically active TiO2 layer that consists directly of anatase nanocrystallites. Such anodic layers show, without any annealing, a high photocatalytic degradation activity for AO7 (an azo‐dye used as model pollutant) that is higher than the activity of comparable fully crystallized TiO2 nanotube layers. Furthermore, the hierarchically structured layers have a remarkable mechanical bending stability. These features make these novel anodic layers highly promising for applications in flexible substrate based photocatalytic devices. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]