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Publication

Ordering of TiO2 nanoparticles into mesoporous structures

Book Contribution - Book Abstract Conference Contribution

Mesoporous titania is a cheap, non-toxic photocatalyst that can play an important role in for example hydrogen generation from water splitting, -air and water purification. Furthermore, porous titania is already used as a catalyst in different industrial processes, such as the recovery of elemental sulfur from waste gases. A generally applied synthesis strategy for this kind of materials is the soft-templating approach in which hydrolysis and condensation reactions around micelles of the template result in the formation of an amorphous network of titanium dioxide. This is followed by a thermal treatment to remove the template and crystallize the TiO2. The disadvantage of this procedure is the use of high thermal treatment temperatures, necessary to create the photocatalytically active anatase crystal phase, which causes the collapse of the porous structure due to thermal instability of the organic soft template. The novel strategy to synthesize crystalline mesoporous TiO2 structures, proposed in this presentation, consists of first synthesizing TiO2 nanocrystals and their subsequent ordering by addition of a a micelle forming surfactant that contains a functional chemical group that can chemically anchor to the nanoparticles. Two different surfactants were used, the commercial available pluronic P123 and a self-synthetized PDMA-b-PS block copolymer. We were able to obtain crystalline anatase TiO2 exhibiting a surface of 230 m²/g and a high degree of crystallinity. The obtained powders were investigated for their photocatalytic activity by following the degradation of methylene blue under UV-light.
Book: ChemCYS book of abstracts
Number of pages: 1
Publication year:2014