Magnetron sputtering in the creation of photonic nanostructures derived from Sasakia Charonda Formosana-butterfly wings for applied in dye-sensitized solar cells

Creating new functional materials derived from the structures seen on butterfly wings has achieved interest in a variety of research topics. However, there need a concision approach could result in a high quality, precise, and convenient process for the fabrication of complex nanostructures replication with unique functionalities based on the butterfly wings. Here we developed a pithy approach based on a magnetron sputtering metal Ti process for biotemplating used to refine hierarchically porous titanium dioxide photonic crystal nanostructures (TiO2-PCN), themselves derived from nanostructures present on the wings of Sasakia Charonda Formosana (S. Charonda) butterflies. For the first time, the TiO2-PCN were deposited on the top of the P25 active layer and were used to fabricate DSSCs as the light-scattering layers of photoanodes with power conversion efficiencies of up to 8.7%. Remarkably, a much enhanced photocurrent density and a prominent photoelectrochemical conversion capability have been achieved, which are exceeding most of the previously reported photoanodes as well as a similar butterflies replication-based device structure. Our study suggests many exciting opportunities of developing artificially engineered butterfly wing-based solar-to-fuel conversion. (C) 2016 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.