Inkjetready Sol-gel Synthesis of Nanocrystalline Titania Colloids

Abstract

Materials based on titanium dioxide produced as a highly photoactive catalysts, attracted the attention of many researchers because of the environmentally friendly destruction of substantially all organic contaminants. In this study, the inkjet titania films with hierarchical structures were prepared by a combined sol–gel and inkjet method. The X-ray powder diffraction (XRD) result indicated that the synthesized titania nanoproducts were of pure anatase phase. The data of low-temperature nitrogen adsorption-desorption and TEM (SEM) images demonstrate that the formed nanocolloids had a narrow particle size distribution with average diameter of 15 nm and were composed of nanocrystals with about 7 nm in diameter. The Brunauer–Emmett–Teller (BET) results showed that the titania inkjet layers have high surface area (110-127 m2/g) and lots of mesopores.