Effects of pH on physicochemical properties of nanocrystalline TiO2 synthesized via sol-gel hydrothermal method

Titanium dioxide (TiO2) has been extensively studied
as it can be applied to many different applications. TiO2
nanomaterial has several unique properties that enable them to
be desirable for many applications and make the production of
TiO2 nanomaterial very important and in demand. Multitude of
methods and processes are available to synthesize these TiO2
nanomaterials. The ability to manipulate and control the method
is the key in producing these nanomaterials with specific
properties for the desired applications. Sol-gel hydrothermal is a
very flexible and cost-effective method that has been employed
to produce TiO2 nanocrystalline. This paper presents the
experimental study on the method to produce titanium dioxide
(TiO2) nanocrystalline by using sol-gel hydrothermal method. A
simple sol-gel hydrothermal technique which is easily controlled and reproduced is done to obtain nanocrystalline titanium dioxide (TiO2). By hydrolyzing titanium tetrachloride, TiCl4 in a mixture of hydrochloric acid (HCl) and deionized water, TiO2 nanopowder was obtained after calcinations at 400 oC. The samples were characterized by Field Emission Scanning Electron Microscope (FESEM), X-ray Diffraction (XRD), Transmission Electron Microscope (TEM) and UV-Visspectroscopy to study their physicochemical properties. From the result obtained, it shows that TiO2 nanocrystalline is well synthesized at pH 2 with estimated size of 10-20 nm and also have the highest absorption intensity compared to other samples.