Structural and diffuse reflectance investigation of dysprosium-doped TiO2 nanopowder synthesized by sonochemical hydrolysis technique

Abstract

A simple sonochemical hydrolysis was used to synthesize dysprosium (Dy) doped titania (TiO2) nanopowder. The microstructure results have been confirmed the amorphous structure with high roughness-surface morphology of the undoped TiO2 sample. Whereas, Dy-doped TiO2 samples are in anatase phase with small crystallite size ~5.5 nm. The optical energy gap exhibited close variations with Dy content that is referring to the stability of the inner structure of the basic anatase unit cell. The amorphous pure and crystalline doped samples are exhibited high value of NIR reflectance (RNIR∗) with percentage varied from 88.14 to 66.61%. Such high values of RNIR∗ could be attributed to high roughness-surface morphology and the small particle size of the investigated samples, respectively. Moreover, the doped sample with the low content of Dy was gotten the lowest value of the reflectance in visible light range (RVIS∗) that referred to its ability to reduce the glare of the reflected sunlight in such range.