Copper and titanium remain relatively plentiful in earth crust. Therefore, using them in solar energy conversion technologies are of significant interest. In this work, cuprous oxide (Cu2O)-modified short TiO2 nanotube array electrode was prepared based on the following two design ideas: first, the short titania nanotubes obtained from sonoelectrochemical anodization possess excellent charge separation and transportation properties as well as desirable mechanical stability; second, the sonoelectrochemical deposition technique favours the improvement in the combination between Cu2O and TiO2 nanotubes, and favours the dispersion of Cu2O particles. UV-Vis absorption and photo-electronchemical measurements proved that the Cu2O coating extended the visible spectrum absorption and the solar spectrum-induced photocurrent response. Under AM1.5 irradiation, the photocurrent density of the composite electrode (i.e. sonoelectrochemical deposition for 5 min) was more than 4.75 times as high as the pure nanotube electrode. Comparing the photoactivity of the Cu2O/TiO2 electrode obtained using sonoelectrochemical deposition with others that synthesized using plain electrochemical deposition, the photocurrent density of the former electrode was ~2.2 times higher than that of the latter when biased at Cuprous oxide (Cu2O) is a semiconductor having a direct band gap of 2.0 eV, which has been studied previously for application in solar energy converting devices [9]. A major attraction of Cu2O is that it is an inexpensive, non-toxic and readily available material. However, semiconductor materials with band gap suitable for capturing a significant fraction of incident solar
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