Synthesis of Zr-doped TiO 2 templated from cloth and its photocatalytic activity
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ORIGINAL PAPER
Synthesis of Zr-doped TiO2 templated from cloth and its photocatalytic activity Baojun Huang & Manying Liu & Yange Zhang & Pinjiang Li & Zhi Zheng
Received: 21 July 2011 / Revised: 23 July 2012 / Accepted: 29 July 2012 / Published online: 24 August 2012 # Springer-Verlag 2012
Abstract Biomorphic Zr-doped TiO2 (ZrxTi1 − xO2) with hierarchical micro- and nanostructures was successfully fabricated using cloth as the host template. We found that the resulting ZrxTi1 − xO2 faithfully duplicated the morphologic microstructures of the initial cloth with grain size of about 10–50 nm. The photocatalytic activity of the as-prepared ZrxTi1 − xO2 was examined by the degradation of rhodamine B in aqueous solution under simulated solar light, which showed that templates pretreated with NaOH solution followed by mixed acid and an appropriate amount of doped Zr (3 mol%) could significantly enhance the photocatalytic activities of ZrxTi1 − xO2. This simple template method provides a cost-effective and ecofriendly route to synthesize other metal-doped semiconductor materials of predicted morphology. Keywords Photocatalytic . Zr-doped TiO2 . Cloth
Introduction Most natural biomaterials have hierarchically ordered structures and can be harvested in large amounts at low costs [1], thus using natural biomaterials and their ramifications as templates to fabricate functional inorganic or organic materials with biomorphic structure under mild conditions has been noteworthy as a new nanofabrication technique in recent years [2–4]. Up to now, several kinds of biomaterials and their ramifications such as yeasts [5], wood [6, 7], dog and human hair [8], insect wings [9], cotton/cloth textile B. Huang : M. Liu : Y. Zhang : P. Li : Z. Zheng (*) Key Laboratory of Micro-Nano Materials for Energy Storage and Conversion of Henan Province, Institute of Surface Micro and Nano Materials, Xuchang University, Xuchang, Henan 461000, China e-mail: [email protected]
[10, 11], paper [12–14], and so on have been used as templates for the synthesis of various biomorphic advanced functional materials because of their multiscale anatomy and stability created by long-term evolutionary processes. In recent years, semiconductor photocatalysis has attracted increasing attention as a potential environmental technology for wastewater purification [15]. Generally speaking, the redox ability of the photogenerated charge carriers in photocatalysts produced by UV or visible light irradiation depends on their band structure [16, 17]. It is well known that titanium dioxide (TiO2) is one of the most widely used semiconductor photocatalysts because of its low cost, nontoxicity, and chemical stability [18, 19]. However, as a wide band gap semiconductor (ca. 3.0 eV for rutile and 3.2 eV for anatase) [20], TiO2 can only be excited with UV irradiation, which accounts for only a small proportion (about 5 %) of solar energy [21]. Therefore, in order to improve the photocatalytic efficiency of TiO2, more attention has been paid to effectively use the photogenerated
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