Abstract
In this study, Titanium dioxide (TiO2) nano-powder was prepared using a sol-gel process with and without surfactant. A typical non-ionic surfactant (Triton X-100) was used during the process. The phase compositions of TiO2 and surfactant-assisted TiO2 (TiO2-sa) were investigated by FTIR, X-ray diffraction (XRD), scanning electron microscope-energy dispersive spectroscopy (SEM-EDS), and thermogravimetric analysis (TGA). Brunauer-Emmett-Teller (BET) was used to determine the nano-powder's specific surface area and pore size distribution. Moreover, transmission electron microscopy (TEM) and selected area electron diffraction (SAED) analysis exhibited particle size in the range of 65-85 nm and polycrystalline phase, respectively. UV-vis spectrophotometer showed high absorption as dominating the visible region (438-450 nm) with relative redshift and reduced bandgap from 2.98 to 3.12 eV upon adding surfactant on TiO2. X-ray fluorescence spectroscopy (XRF) exhibits high purity TiO2 with more than 82% composition with the lowest relative standard deviation (RSD %). Moreover, the photoluminescence (PL) of TiO2-sa showed enhanced oxygen vacancies and surface defects which reduce the direct electron-photon (e/h+) pair recombination. TiO2-sa illustrated promising characteristic features of an active photocatalyst for the degradation of organic pollutants.