Comparative study of doped-TiO2 nanocrystals prepared by sol-gel and solvothermal approaches

TiO2 is a versatile material that has been demanded for its potential applications in electronics, optoelectronics, photonics and so on. This paper reports the preparation of TiO2 and Cr-TiO2 nanoparticles synthesized by sol-gel and solvothermal methods. Both the synthesis methods yielded the pure anatase phase of TiO2 as endorsed by the X-ray diffraction analyses. Fourier transform infrared spectroscopy (FTIR) study demonstrated the functional group of Ti-O-Ti in all the samples. Field-emission scanning electron microscopy (FESEM) measurement showed the agglomerated nanoparticles synthesized by sol-gel approach as compared to solvothermal derived one. Further, this work explores the comparative study of Cr-TiO2 nanoparticles prepared by varying the Cr concentration. (C) 2020 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.