Facile synthesis of amorphous Ti-peroxo complex for photocatalytic activity under visible-light irradiation

Abstract In this paper, amorphous Ti-peroxo complexes (ATPC) were successfully synthesized by a facile exothermic sol-gel method without annealing process. The TiH2 and H2O2 are used as starting precursor and oxidative polymerization agent. The color of prepared ATPC powder was changed from green to yellow with increase of H2O2 which directly induce the formation of small flakes on the ATPC, resulted in high surface area (154.1 m2/g). Raman and FT-IR spectra shows that the more peroxo groups such as Ti–OOH, Ti–O–O–Ti and -O-Ti-O- in yellow colored ATPC are formed than that of green colored ATPC. These peroxo groups not only accelerate the photocatalytic activity by abundant superoxide anion radicals, but also induce the formation of oxygen vacancies which can lead the visible-light activity. The prepared yellow colored ATPC shows remarkable visible-light induced photocatalytic activity with 95% decolorization of Rhodamine B within 30 min. Compare with previous researches related with titania based photocatalyst, the yellow colored ATPC shows excellent recycling property with maintained decolorization rate.