Preparation and Properties of Monodisperse SnO2 Hollow Micro/Nano Spheres

water medium were calcined at high temperature to remove PSS and to obtain SnO2 hollow micro/nano spheres. We investigated the effects of precursor concentration, amount of surfactant, reaction time, and templates choice. Scanning electron microscopy (SEM), X-ray diffraction (XRD), infrared (IR) spectroscopy, thermogravimetric analysis (TGA), H2 temperature programmed reduction (H2-TPR), Brunauer-Emmett-Teller (BET) measurement, and other technical probes were used to detect the structure and properties of the prepared SnO2 hollow micro/nano spheres, and compared them with those of solid SnO2. BET and H2-TPR showed that the hollow SnO2 micro/nano spheres had improved specific surface area, surface oxygen vacancies, and oxidation activity. We inferred the growth mechanism of the core-shell structure from IR spectroscopy and XRD pattern and optimized the simple and reasonable synthesis procedure to obtain SnO2 hollow micro/nano spheres which had smooth surface, compact structure, and well controlled cladding thickness.