Abstract
The mesoporous nitrogen-doped titania (N-doped TiO2) has been synthesized through sol-gel method by refluxing the precursor mixture, continued by hydrolysis process, and then followed by annealing in air at the desired temperature. The pH of precursor mixture solution before hydrolysis process has been varied to study their influence on the resulting N-doped TiO2. The resulting material were characterized using X-Ray Diffraction (XRD), N2 Gas Sorption Analyzer (GSA), X-ray Photoelectron Spectroscopy (XPS), Scanning Electron Microscopy (SEM), and UV Vis Spectrophotometer. The XRD analysis result showed that the pH and water content played an important role on the crystal formation of the N-doped TiO2. The result showed that a high acidity condition resulted in a favored tendency of anatase crystalline phase, while lowering acidity leaded to the rutile formation. Porosity analysis showed the significant influence of pH in the synthesis process on the pore characteristic and pore size distribution of the resulting material. The photocatalytic activity was tested on the methylene blue degradation system comparing to pure TiO2 and commercial Degussa P25 and the result showed that the synthesized N-doped TiO2 provided better photocatalytic activities.
Highlights
The photocatalytic process has been widely used to overcome the environmental problem and energy embarrassment due to its effectivity and eco-friendly
It showed that the synthesis in acid condition could effectively reduce the rate of rapid hydrolysis and successfully resulted in anatase crystalline phase
In neutral and basic systems, the hydrolysis takes place more quickly to allow the formation of the rutile crystalline phase, as indicated by the increase in the intensity of the typical rutile peak with increasing pH
Summary
The photocatalytic process has been widely used to overcome the environmental problem and energy embarrassment due to its effectivity and eco-friendly. Titanium dioxide with an intrinsic band-gap energy around 3–3.4 eV, is only active in UV radiation, which only about 5% of solar energy on earth’s surface, impairs TiO2 for such important application. To overcome this limitation, it is necessary to broader the absorption edge into visible light (Pelaez et al, 2012). Efforts for increasing the visible light response of titanium dioxide were focused on the doping of transition metal (Basavarajappa et al, 2020; Zhou & Fu, 2013; Yu, Wang, Li, Zheng, & Cao, 2015), but several problems appeared to make metal-doped TiO2 impractical such as thermal instability, the formation of charge carrier recombination center, and expensive facilities for ion implantation. The nonmetal doping was found as a more effective and efficient method for utilizing TiO2 (Shang et al, 2014; Wu, Nishikawa, Ohtani, & Chen, 2007; Yalçin et al, 2010), and among nonmetal anion doping such as N, C, S, P, nitrogen seems to be the most successful dopant for TiO2
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