Sharif Digital Repository

Titanium dioxide is a cheap, chemically stable and non-toxic material. However its photocatalytic properties are unstable and it is a modest semiconductor and a mediocre insulator. For several applications it would be interesting to make it either more insulating or more conducting. The goal of this work was to modify the photocatalytic properties of nano-crystalline TiO2 powders by wet chemical routes and hydrothermal methods to understand the mechanism leading to these modifications The principal factors that influence the photocatalytic properties are on the one hand the concentration and nature of the chemical and physical conditions in TiO2, and on the other hand the morphology of the... 

Three-dimensional (3D) bundles of self-assembled lanthanum hydroxide nanorods with average crystallite size of about 20 nm were fabricated via a facile and rapid microwave-assisted chemical route. The obtained material was characterized with X-ray diffractometry (XRD), scanning electron microscopy (SEM) and transmission electron microscopy (TEM) investigations. The obtained nanorods have average diameter of about 115 nm and average length of about 730 nm. Self-assembly of primary La(OH)3 nanoparticles and their subsequent anisotropic growth along 〈2 0 0〉 direction, was proposed to be the mechanism for the formation of 3D bundles of nanorods, using TEM images. The thermal behavior of the...