Recently, the research team led by Prof. Lu Qinghua of SJTU School of Chemistry and Chemical Engineering has developed a facile and highly effective approach for the large-scale preparation of vertically aligned mesochannels in mesoporous titania films.

This approach is able to control the unidirectional alignment of titania mesochannels in a desired direction (e.g., parallel, perpendicular, or oblique). The achievement of the team has been published in Journal of the American Chemistry Society (J. Am. Chem. Soc.2012, DOI:10.1021/ja309168f).

Expert review panel agree that the research is of great importance and challenges and it is a vital progress in this area.

The research shows that the unidirectional, vertically aligned mesostructured titania films exhibit excellent ion conductivity. Consequently, such titania films have considerable potential to be applied in light-harvesting devices such as quantum dot solar cells, optical switch and molecular separation film devices.

For the paper "A Facile Approach for Controlling the Orientation of One-Dimensional Mesochannels in Mesoporous Titania Films", please click here.

Translated by Zhu Xiaotong | Reviewed by Tian Cong