Large-scale fabrication of porous YBO3 hollow microspheres with tunable photoluminescence.

Zhenhe Xu,Yanfeng Bi,He Yu,Yaguang Sun,Yu Gao,Guiyan Zhao,Fu Ding,Feixue Ai,Liangliang Huang

doi:10.1098/rsos.172186

Abstract

Hollow lanthanide-doped compounds are some of the most popular materials for high-performance luminescent devices. However, it is challenging to find an approach that can fabricate large-scale and well-crystallized lanthanide-doped hollow structures and that is facile, efficient and of low cost. In this study, YBO3: Eu3+/Tb3+ hollow microspheres were fabricated by using a novel multi-step transformation synthetic route for the first time with polystyrene spheres as the template, followed by the combination of a facile homogeneous precipitation method, an ion-exchange process and a calcination process. The results show that the as-obtained YBO3: Eu3+/Tb3+ hollow spheres have a uniform morphology with an average diameter of 1.65 µm and shell thickness of about 160 nm. When used as luminescent materials, the emission colours of YBO3: Eu3+/Tb3+ samples can be tuned from red, through orange, yellow and green-yellow, to green by simply adjusting the relative doping concentrations of the activator ions under the excitation of ultraviolet light, which might have potential applications in fields such as light display systems and optoelectronic devices.

Highlights

Luminescent materials, especially lanthanide-doped materials, have attracted extensive synthetic interest due to their remarkable luminescence properties, such as various emission colours, high photochemical stability, low toxicity, narrow emission2018 The Authors
The interface chemical transformation gradually continued to occur with the inner layer in the hydrothermal condition, resulting in the pure YBO3 layer. (iv) Calcination of the core-shell PS@YBO3 microspheres in air to remove the PS microsphere template to get the YBO3 hollow spheres and increase of crystallinity of the final product
After the synthesis of the core-shell PS@YBO3 microspheres, we investigated the effect of calcination on the morphology of the as-prepared product

Summary

Introduction

Luminescent materials, especially lanthanide-doped materials, have attracted extensive synthetic interest due to their remarkable luminescence properties, such as various emission colours, high photochemical stability, low toxicity, narrow emission. There are four main methods for synthesizing hollow structures: (i) conventional hard templating method, (ii) sacrificial templating method, (iii) soft templating method and (iv) template-free method. We systematically investigated the photoluminescence (PL) colours of the YBO3 hollow spheres co-doped with Eu3+ and Tb3+ ions, which could be tuned from red, through yellow and green-yellow, to green by adjusting the relative doping concentrations of the activator ions. The development of this method would offer a new platform for the fabrication of other hollow structure materials

Materials

Preparation of monodispersed polystyrene microspheres

Preparation of the monodisperse YBO3 hollow microspheres

Characterization

Results and discussion

Conclusion