Facile synthesis and growth mechanism of mesoporous anatase titanium dioxide nanoparticles via sol-gel method

An investigation on the synthesis of highly monodispersed mesoporous anatase titanium dioxide (TiO2) nanoparticles has been reported in this work. The mesoporous nanoparticles were obtained by a facile sol-gel method where titanium isopropoxide (TTIP) was used as the titanium precursor in basic solution. Here, the effect of reaction time was studied to study the growing mechanism of TiO2 nanocrystal. The as-synthesized nanoparticles were characterized with X-Ray Diffraction (XRD), Fourier Transform Infrared (FTIR), Brunauer-Emmett-Teller (BET) Surface Area Analyzer, and High Resolution Tunneling Electron Microscopy (HR-TEM). Based on the result, it is found that a highly monodispersed mesoporous anatase TiO2 nanoparticles with large surface area could successfully be synthesized. It is also believed that the morphology of as-synthesized particles could easily be controlled by the reaction time. Results show that uniform mesoporous TiO2 nanoparticles with perfect spherical morphology could be obtained when the reaction was performed in 3 hours of reaction time.