Fabrication and Optical Properties of Conjugated Polymer Composited Multi-Arrays of TiO₂ Nanowires via Sequential Electrospinning

We report here a simple method of fabricating multi-layered architectures of cross-aligned inorganic nanowires via sequential electrospinning method equipped with a newly devised collector that is able to prepare aligned inorganic nanowires. The multi-layers of aligned TiO₂ nanowires can be deposited in a proportional increment of weight with collecting time and reveal a large reduction of electrical resistance by at least 30% compared to a randomly collected TiO₂ nanowire structure. The solar cell performance of the cross-aligned TiO₂ nanowire layers composited with a conjugated polymer of poly[2-methoxy, 5-(2′-ethyl-hexyloxy)-1,4-phenylenevinylene] (MEH-PPV) is significantly enhanced by 70% or greater in the organic–inorganic hybrid photovoltaic devices than that fabricated with the randomly-collected TiO₂ nanowire photoanode.