Synthesis and characterization of TiO2 photocatalytic thin films prepared from refluxed PTA sols

Abstract The peroxo titanic series refluxed sols (RS) were synthesized using titanyl sulfate (TiOSO 4 ), ammonia as raw materials and peroxide (H 2 O 2 ) as chelating agent by refluxing method from peroxo titanic acid sol. The transparent nano anatase TiO 2 thin films fixed on glass slide substrates were prepared from the RS precursors by dip-coating, then dried under infrared light and calcined at 500 °C for 30 min. Several characterization techniques, such as FT-IR, XRD, TEM, TG-DTA, SEM, were applied to characterize the RS sol and TiO 2 thin films. The results indicated that the RS sols were flavescent, semitransparent and alkalescent, the RS sols kept stable at room temperature, and contained needle-like TiO 2 anatase crystals which were 30∼80 nm in length, 15–20 nm in diameter and well distributed in the sols. The TiO 2 films were uniform, compact and transparent. The degradation of 10 mg/L methyl orange results illustrated that the RS-6 TiO 2 thin films showed the best photocatalytic activities, the decoloration rate of the methyl orange solution with RS-6 TiO 2 thin films reached 99% after irradiated 160 min under UV light, which proved TiO 2 films prepared from RS sol showed high photocatalytic activities.