A facile urea-assisted thermal decomposition process of TiO2 nanoparticles and their photocatalytic activity

Abstract

In the present work, we have reported a facile and large-scale synthesis of TiO2 nanopar-ticles (NPs) through urea-assisted thermal decomposition of titanium oxysulphate. We have successfully synthesized TiO2 NPs by using this effective route with different weight ratios of titanium oxysulphate: urea. The structures and properties of TiO2 NPs were confirmed by scanning electron microscope) (SEM), transmission electron microscopy (TEM), thermogravimetric analysis (TGA), fourier transform infrared spectroscopy (FT-IR), ultra violet–visible spectroscopy (UV-vis), and pho-toluminescence (Pl) techniques. XRD demonstrated that TiO2 NPs holds of anatase crystal phase with crystallizing size 14–19 nm even after heating at 600◦C. TGA, SEM, and TEM images reveal urea’s role, which controls the size, morphology, and aggregation of TiO2 NPs during the thermal decomposition. These TiO2 NPs were employed for photodegradation of Methyl Orange (MO) in the presence of ultraviolet (UV) radiation. An interesting find was that the TiO2 NPs exhibited better photocatalytic activity and excellent recycling stability over several photodegradation cycles. Fur-thermore, the present method has a great perspective to be used as an efficient method for large-scale synthesis of TiO2 NPs.