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A Study on the Effect of Morphology and Sol-gel Process Parameters on Photocatalytic Properties of Tialite

Bakhshandeh, Fatemeh | 2016

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  1. Type of Document: M.Sc. Thesis
  2. Language: Farsi
  3. Document No: 49424 (07)
  4. University: Sharif University of Technology
  5. Department: Materials Science and Engineering
  6. Advisor(s): Maddah Hosseini, Hamid Reza
  7. Abstract:
  8. Enhancement of photocatalytic characteristics of semiconductors have been always a challenge for the researchers. Doping semiconductors for adjusting their energy gap and changing their morphology in order to increase their effective surface area and reaction sites are examples of their endeavor to overcome the challenge. In this research, nanostructured Aluminum Titanate powder was synthesized with Sol-Gel process and by altering synthesis parameters, the best synthesis condition to get the best possible band gap was discovered. Moreover, we examined the photocatalytic properties of the recently developed material “tialite”, which were not studied before and also evaluated the effect of different phases and size of nanoparticles. By means of this synthesis method, the band gap was reduced from 4.5 eV in bulk form to 2.9 eV in nanostructured tialite. Experiments showed 33.56% degradation for tialit and it was revealed that tialite has better photocatalytic properties compared to un-doped Titanium Oxide. The results demonstrate that by increasing the calcination time from 2 hours to 15 hours, does not have any considerable effect on the size of Aluminum Titanate crystallites but reduces the degradation of Methylene Blue from 56.33% to 28.54%. Therefore It could be deduced that the size of the particles have increased; a result that is further affirmed by FE-SEM pictures. It is concluded that the size of aglomerates holding the primary particles are effective on photocatalytic properties as well as the size of the particles; such that by formation or growth of aglomerates, the photocatalytic activity is weakened as a consequence of decrease in effective surface area of the particles
  9. Keywords:
  10. Photocatalytic Activity ; Sol-Gel Method ; Band Gap ; Morphology ; Tialite

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