Applied Surface Science, Vol.405, 195-204, 2017
Morphologically tuned 3D/1D rutile TiO2 hierarchical hybrid microarchitectures engineered by one-step surfactant free hydrothermal method
Present investigation reports on the surfactant free hydrothermal synthesize of the morphologically tuned hierarchical hybrid rutile titanium oxide (TiO2) microarchitectures showing three dimensional microflower structures and cook pine tree like structures on the one dimensional nanorods formed over TiO2 seed layer coated glass substrates by tuning growth temperature. TiO2 seed layer of similar to 100nm thick was coated on the glass substrates employing sol-gel spin coating method and then rutile TiO2 microarchitectures were synthesized on the TiO2 seed layer by one-step surfactant free hydrothermal method. Deposited samples were characterized by X-ray diffraction, scanning electron microscopy, energy dispersive spectroscopy, UV-vis spectroscopy and photoluminescence spectroscopy techniques. Influence of the growth temperature on the crystallinity, morphology and optical properties along with the growth mechanism to achieve hierarchical microarchitectures was investigated. Present work revealed that the structural, morphological and optical properties of the TiO2 hierarchical microarchitectures strongly depend on the growth temperature. Further we proposed a model for the cause to effect possible morphological changes of rutile TiO2 microarchitectures as a function of growth temperatures on the TiO2 seeded glass substrates. (C) 2017 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.
Keywords:Seed layer;3D/1D TiO2 microarchitectures;Hydrothermal method;Texture coefficient;Scanning electron microscopy;Growth mechanism