Low temperature ionothermal synthesis of TiO 2 nanomaterials for efficient photocatalytic H 2 production, dye degradation and photoluminescence studies

Abstract

The photocatalytic hydrogen generation is a novel, eco-friendly and favourable method for production of green and clean energy using light energy. In this direction, we report low-temperature ionothermal method for the preparation of TiO2 nanoparticles (NPs) using methoxy ethyl methyl imidazolium tris (pentafluoroethyl) trifluoro phosphate (MOEMINtf2) as an ionic liquid (IL) at 120°C for 1 day. The synthesized nanomaterials were examined using different spectrochemical methods like UV-DRS, XRD, FT-IR, TEM, BET and TGA-DTA techniques. The mixed phase TiO2 is obtained with 81.7% of anatase and 18.3% of rutile phase by the XRD studies, and average crystallite size is found to be ∼7 nm. The stretching of Ti-O bond (∼555 cm−1) and few other bands related to ionic liquid were confirmed by FTIR spectrum. The band gap energy was observed to be ∼3.38 eV by UV-DRS analysis. TEM images reveal spherical shape with an average particles size of about 10 nm. Photocatalytic H2 generation was carried out using TiO2 NPs and observed the generation of 553 μmol h−1 g−1 via water splitting reaction. Furthermore, the prepared TiO2 NPs employed for the photocatalytic degradation of methylene blue dye (84.54%), and photoluminescence studies confirms the obtained material can be used in optoelectronic applications with green emission.