Hierarchical flower-like nanostructures of anatase TiO2 nanosheets dominated by {001} facets

Hierarchical nanostructures of anatase TiO2 with high specific surface area are specially significant in various applications. In this work, we using a one-pot, template-free method that employed ethanol as mild solvent and obtained hierarchical flower-like TiO2 nanostructures. Interestingly, the hierarchical structures are assembled by ultrathin nanosheets dominated by {001} facets, and the thickness of nanosheets are about 10 nm. We find that the reaction time plays an important role in the growth mechanism and the hierarchical flower-like of anatase TiO2 was governed by a nucleation and nuclei growth-dissolution-recrystallization growth mechanism from time-dependent morphology evolution. The experimental parameters which influence the morphologies, such as reaction species and temperature, were further studied. The results show that the hierarchical flower-like nanostructures of anatase TiO2 nanosheets dominated by {001} facets exhibit higher photocatalytic activity in the degradation of methylene blue under ultraviolet-visible light irradiation, can be attributed to the synergetic effect of the architecture, high crystallinity, large specific surface areas, and the exposed highly activity {001} facets of the photocatalysts. (C) 2015 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.