Templated synthesis of titanium dioxide tube-in-tube superstructures with enhanced photocatalytic and lithium storage performance

Abstract Hollow nanostructures with large surface area and additional free volume enable increasing contacting area and structure stability, beneficial to improve photocatalytic and lithium storage performances. Although successes have been achieved for spherical and cubic hollow structures, it is still a big challenge to prepare hollow materials with special structures. Herein we report a facile templated route for novel three-dimensional titanium dioxide tube-in-tube superstructures (TTS) with α-Fe 2 O 3 hollow prisms as removable templates. The novel TiO 2 TTS exhibit an obvious enhancement in photocatalysis to decompose rhodamine B under simulated sunlight compared with commercial TiO 2 and TiO 2 nanospheres. As anode material for LIB, the achieved sample delivers a high specific capacity of about 150 mAh·g −1 over 500 cycles, outperforming most of TiO 2 -based anode materials. These outstanding multifunction performances can be attributed to the unique tube-in-tube superstructures with large surface area and many active sites.