An effective template-free synthesis strategy for hierarchical titanium oxide hybrids: tailoring the solvent environment

Abstract

Strategic tailoring of solvent mixtures in solvothermal synthesis harnessed the hydrolysis kinetics and direction of crystal growth, leading to sophisticated morphological control of the size, shape, porosity and overall texture of the resulting materials. The approach enabled successful preparation of hierarchical hybrid titanium oxides of diverse morphologies via a relatively simple low-cost template-free synthesis. Such synthesised materials exhibit superior specific surface areas of 106.2–639.4 m² g⁻¹ along with varied morphologies, in contrast to that of commercial Degussa P25 TiO₂ (ca. 60 m² g⁻¹), and demonstrated promising efficiency and effectiveness in environmental applications, e.g. inorganic and organic pollutant removal from water and as a host for a co-catalyst/photocatalyst.