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Scalable Free‐Radical Polymerization Based Sol–Gel Synthesis of SrTiO 3 and its Photocatalytic Activity
Author(s) -
Challagulla Swapna,
Nagarjuna Ravikiran,
Roy Sounak,
Ganesan Ramakrishnan
Publication year - 2017
Publication title -
chemistryselect
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 0.437
H-Index - 34
ISSN - 2365-6549
DOI - 10.1002/slct.201700570
Subject(s) - photocatalysis , materials science , alkoxide , calcination , polymerization , sol gel , acrylate , chemical engineering , oxide , monomer , radical polymerization , catalysis , nanotechnology , polymer , organic chemistry , composite material , chemistry , engineering , metallurgy
Recently, polymerizable sol–gel approach has been emerged as a potential route to synthesize supported catalytic oxides and also to fabricate nanostructures. However, this approach has been limited only to liquid metal‐alkoxide precursors as the polymerizable precursor has to be in liquid form consisting of homogeneously dissolved metal‐alkoxide and the monomers. Hitherto, this approach has been limited to synthesize only monometallic oxides. This work augments for the first time, the capability of this approach to synthesize SrTiO 3 , a promising mixed metal semiconducting oxide. As a prerequisite, a soluble Sr‐acrylate derivative is synthesized and mixed with Ti‐acrylate to constitute the polymerizable sol–gel precursor resin. This resin is subjected to thermal polymerization, followed by calcination to obtain SrTiO 3 powder. In addition to synthesis of powder material, the synthetic approach presented here is also found to be suitable to fabricate SrTiO 3 thin film without using any sophisticated deposition techniques. The ball milling of as‐synthesized bulk SrTiO 3 has resulted in an increase in the surface area and lowering in crystallite size. The as‐synthesized and the ball milled SrTiO 3 are studied for their efficacies towards photocatalytic environmental remediation by taking methylene blue and Cr(VI) as representative pollutants. The increase in surface area due to milling is found to be beneficial in enhancing the photocatalytic activity of SrTiO 3 compared to the bulk.