(242d) Novel One Step Synthesis of N Doped TiO2 By Liquid Flame Aerosol Method (LFSP) for Visible Light Photocatalysis of Organic Pollutant

At present, there has been a growing attention in the synthesis of nanomaterials which are active in visible light for the photocatalytic degradation of volatile organic compounds. Nitrogen doped titanium dioxide is attracting a continuously increasing attention because of its potential as material for environmental photocatalysis. Conventional wet synthesis methods need multiple processing steps, high energy input and long processing times, In contrast, flame synthesis, especially liquid flame spray pyrolysis (LFSP), is a versatile one-step process for synthesizing a variety of nanoparticles. In the present work, we have developed a novel, inexpensive, green and highly reproducible method of the making the liquid precursor for the N incorporation in TiO₂ by using the rapid LFSP method. We have studied the effect of the synthesis parameters such as: 1) water to fuel ratio 2) mixing conditions, 3) concentration of the nitric acid, and 4) various N sources. A combination of various physico-chemical characterizations were performed. The photocatalytic activity and stability of the N-doped TiO₂ samples were evaluated through using the decomposition of phenol as model reaction under visible light irradiation. Characterization results show that the nitrogen dopants have a significant effect on the crystallite size and optical absorption of TiO₂. It is found that the N-doped TiO₂ catalysts have enhanced absorption in the visible light region, and exhibit higher activity for photocatalytic degradation of VOCs. We have produced The UV-vis spectroscopy results of N incorporated TiO₂ showed enhancement of light absorption in the visible range by selected composite materials in the UV range (250-400 nm). We have found the Ti/N ratio of 13% for the materials synthesized from our XPS data. The higher surface areas of around (100-120 M²/g) were observed for the catalysts. These interesting results will be discussed in the presentation.