Morphology-dependent photocatalytic activity of TiO2 crystals

Abstract

TiO₂crystals with different morphologies have been successfully synthesized by simple hydrothermal method. All samples are characterized carefully by XRD, SEM, TEM, and BET techniques and the morphological effect on the photocatalytic activity of the obtained TiO₂ crystals has been evaluated by degrading the pollutant molecules. The experimental results show that the TiO₂ samples with different morphologies exhibited different activities to pollutant degradation. The core-shell spheres have exhibited the best photocatalytic activity, with the almost complete degradation of methyl orange (MO) and rhodamine B within 15 min under UV-light irradiation. After 20 min UV-light irradiation, the degradation efficiency of the MO solution is about 68.9%. It can be concluded that a morphological effect is responsible for the photocatalytic performance. The crystals with large BET surface area, the small crystallite size shows the better the photocatalytic performance.