Abstract
The search for novel materials and the development of improved processes for water purification have attracted the interest of researchers worldwide and the use of titanium dioxide in photocatalytic processes for the degradation of organic pollutants contained in water has been one of the benchmarks. Compared to crystalline titanium dioxide (cTiO2), the amorphous material has the advantages of having a higher adsorption capacity and being easier to dope with metal and non-metal elements. In this work, we take advantage of these two features to improve its photocatalytic properties in the degradation of Rhodamine B. The structural characterization by XRD analysis gives evidence of its amorphous nature and the SEM micrographs portray the disc morphology of 300 nm in diameter with heterogeneous grain boundaries. The degradation of Rhodamine B tests with the amorphous TiO2 using visible light confirm its improved catalytic activity compared to that of a commercial product, Degussa P25, which is a well-known crystalline material.
Highlights
The possibility of putting on the market TiO2 -based products is a potentially profitable area of nanostructured materials development due to the advantageous properties of the material and its different practical uses [1]
The XRD diffraction patterns for all the CD-amorphous TiO2 (aTiO2) materials obtained in this work are shown in Figure 1a, and the most apparent feature is their amorphous nature, portrayed by the flat appearance of all the diffractograms [21,22]
Kojima and Sugimoto [23] have shed some light into the particle formation mechanism under similar synthetic protocols where the effects of water content, temperature, and solvent composition were studied
Summary
The possibility of putting on the market TiO2 -based products is a potentially profitable area of nanostructured materials development due to the advantageous properties of the material (low price, chemical inertness, long-term stability, lack of toxicity, etc.) and its different practical uses [1]. More practical applications in medical, automotive, and photocatalytic environmental remediation of water and air can be forecasted for the near future [2,3,4]. For these applications, crystalline TiO2 (cTiO2 ) in its different phases (anatase, rutile, and brookite) has been extensively studied even with some DFT theoretical calculations [5], in particular for its electronic structures and defect levels. Are not enough [6], even though it is the amorphous state that sometimes plays crucial roles in particular applications.
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