Scalable Free-Radical Polymerization Based Sol-Gel Synthesis of SrTiO₃ and its Photocatalytic Activity

Abstract

Recently, polymerizable sol-gel approach has been emerged as a potential route to synthesize supported catalytic oxides and also to fabricate nanostructures. However, this approach has been limited only to liquid metal-alkoxide precursors as the polymerizable precursor has to be in liquid form consisting of homogeneously dissolved metal-alkoxide and the monomers. Hitherto, this approach has been limited to synthesize only monometallic oxides. This work augments for the first time, the capability of this approach to synthesize SrTiO 3 , a promising mixed metal semiconducting oxide. As a prerequisite, a soluble Sr-acrylate derivative is synthesized and mixed with Ti-acrylate to constitute the polymerizable sol-gel precursor resin. This resin is subjected to thermal polymerization, followed by calcination to obtain SrTiO 3 powder. In addition to synthesis of powder material, the synthetic approach presented here is also found to be suitable to fabricate SrTiO 3 thin film without using any sophisticated deposition techniques. The ball milling of assynthesized bulk SrTiO 3 has resulted in an increase in the surface area and lowering in crystallite size. The as-synthesized and the ball milled SrTiO 3 are studied for their efficacies towards photocatalytic environmental remediation by taking methylene blue and Cr(VI) as representative pollutants. The increase in surface area due to milling is found to be beneficial in enhancing the photocatalytic activity of SrTiO 3 compared to the bulk.

Enhanced Photoinduced Electrocatalytic Oxidation of Methanol Using Pt Nanoparticle-Decorated TiO2–Polyaniline Ternary Nanofibers

“…It is evidenced from the literature that the pristine TiO 2 shows the most intense band at 145 cm −1 (E g ) and weak bands at 393 (B 1g ), 505 (A 1g ), and 626 cm −1 (E g ), owing to the Raman-active modes of the pure anatase phase. 32,49 The Raman spectra of TiO 2 −PTP reveal that the pristine E g , B1 g , and A1 g bands are red-shifted to 121, 370, 489, and 610 cm −1 . Again, the E g , B 1g , and A 1g bands are slightly blue-shifted to 124, 375, and 515 cm −1 , respectively, after the Pt NP decoration on TiO 2 -doped PANI because of the electronic interference from the plasmonic Pt NPs with the excitation laser wavelength as a result of the strong metal-support electronic interaction.…”

Polymerizable sol–gel synthesis of dark-visible light antibacterial magnetically-recoverable AgBr-loaded iron oxide/alumina nanocomposite

“…While various solution-based synthetic approaches have been reported to achieve this objective, their scalability often remains a limitation [9,10]. However, a recent breakthrough in the field is the polymerizable sol-gel (PSG) synthetic approach, which offers a versatile and scalable route for the production of supported catalysts [11][12][13][14][15].…”

Modelling of Tio2 Properties for the Band Gap Prediction Using Artificial Neural Networks

“…Even though the first and the second techniques can be used to classify the transition type of the material as direct or indirect, allowed or forbidden, this matter was not always addressed in the scientific reports [26,83]. Besides, some inconsistencies were noticed, such as authors [34,54,72] which have measured the direct band gap though the Modified Kubelka-Munk for pure anatase phase, but considered it having indirect band gap.…”