Abstract
The main motivation of this work is to deposit two different metals (gold and silver) on titanium oxide nanoparticles surface in a one-step simple and fast physical process by applying a nitrogen plasma as the main source of nitrogen atoms to obtain nanostructured N-TiO2 − X/Au/Ag materials. The obtained nanomaterials were characterized by X-ray photoelectron spectroscopy, X-ray diffraction, diffuse reflectance spectroscopy, scanning electron microscopy–energy dispersive X-ray spectroscopy, and high-resolution transmission electron microscopy. Based on the characterization results, we found that gold and silver nanoparticles were uniformly loaded on the titanium oxide nanocomposite surface, showing a surface plasmon absorption band due to the loading of the metal nanoparticles over titania samples. The results of this work have shown that nitrogen plasma technique is a more feasible and simple alternative to obtain the N-TiO2 − X/Au/Ag nanocomposite. Moreover, this plasma technique could be used to impregnate with other kind of metals over the surface of diverse nanomaterials.
Highlights
Titanium oxide (TiO2) has been widely used to eliminate organic contaminants mainly in aqueous media; it is used in air purification through the process of photocatalytic oxidation which occurs on the surface of this semiconductor
One-step nitrogen plasma process for bimetallic impregnation is a new methodology to impregnate two metals in only one plasma treatment without changing the crystalline structure of TiO2 (P25). Applying this technique successfully produces N-TiO2 À x/Au/Ag using nitrogen plasma applied on crystalline TiO2 in contact with the foil of both metals allowing the bimetallic impregnation of Au and Ag in one step
The nitrogen plasma method allows the incorporation of nitrogen in the TiO2 crystalline lattice to obtain a nanocomposite with nitrogen in the crystalline lattice of titania
Summary
Titanium oxide (TiO2) has been widely used to eliminate organic contaminants mainly in aqueous media; it is used in air purification through the process of photocatalytic oxidation which occurs on the surface of this semiconductor. The FESEM images demonstrate that the power employed, and the treatment time required to obtain the bimetallic samples do not generate significant changes in the geometry of the NPs; both TiO2/Au/Ag samples reveal a uniform distribution of particle size and both metals can be distributed uniformly on the surface of TiO2 using the method of impregnation by plasma.
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