Hierarchical Porous TiO2 thin films by soft and dual templating: A quantitative approach of specific surface and porosity

Hierarchical porous structures, with different pore sizes, constitute an important field of research for many applications. However, increasing the pore size results in the decrease of specific surface. There is a need to quantify and predict the resulting porosity and specific surface.
We have prepared hierarchical porous TiO2 thin films either by surfactant templating (soft) or dual surfactant/microspheres templating (soft/hard). They all show narrow, bimodal distribution of pores. Soft templating route leads to very thin films showing high specific surface and bimodal porosity with diameters of 10 nm and 54 nm. Dual templating route combines a Pluronic surfactant-based precursor solution with polystyrene (PS) microspheres (diam. 250 nm) in a one-pot simple process. This gives thicker films with a bimodal distribution of pores (8 nm and 165-200 nm). The dye loading of hierarchical films is compared to pure Pluronic-templated TiO2 films and shows a relative decrease of 29% for Single Templating (ST) and 43% for Dual Templating (DT-250). Finally, a geometrical model is proposed and validated for each system, based on the agreement between calculated specific surfaces and experimental dye loading with N719 dye.