Facile and controllable preparation of mesoporous TiO₂ using poly(ethylene glycol) as structure-directing agent and peroxotitanic acid as precursor

Abstract

This work demonstrated that mesoporous TiO₂ (meso-TiO₂) with controllable mesoporous and crystalline structures can be facilely prepared by using poly(ethylene glycol) (PEG) as structure-directing (SD) agent and peroxotitanic acid (PTA) as precursor. Meso-TiO₂ with high specific surface area (157 m²·g⁻¹), pore volume (0.45 cm³·g⁻¹) and large mesopore size of 13.9 nm can be obtained after calcination at 450°C. Such meso-TiO₂ also shows relatively high thermal stability. BET surface area still reaches 114 m²·g⁻¹ after calcination at 550°C. In the synthesis and calcination process, PEG that plays multiple and important roles in delivering thermally stable and tunable mesoporous and crystalline structures shows to be a suitable low-cost SD agent for the controllable preparation of nanocrystalline meso-TiO₂. The photocatalytic activity tests show that both high surface area and bi-crystallinity of obtained meso-TiO₂ are important in enhancing the performance in photo-decomposing Rhodamine B in water.

Keywords

sol-gel preparation / mesoporous titania / poly(ethylene glycol)

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Acknowledgements

This work was supported by the National Natural Science Foundation of China (Grant Nos. 21471026 and 51272039), the Fundamental Research Funds for the Central Universities (N141005001 and N130810003), and the Liaoning Province Innovation Funds (Grant No. 2014020030).

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2016 Higher Education Press and Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg