Engineering of mono-dispersed mesoporous TiO over 1-D nanorods for water purification under visible light irradiation.

Herein we synthesized a novel structure of mesoporous TiO decorated on 1D ZnO nanorods for environmental remediation. The effect of mesoporous TiO over 1D nanorods were investigated. The phase transitions of nanocomposite were confirmed by powder diffraction analysis. The morphological investigation of synthesized TiO/ZnO catalyst revealed that the TiO are in porous in nature which covered the surface of 1D nanorods. The size of mesoporous TiO nanoparticles was about 10-15 nm. The chemical composition and elemental mapping results clearly evident that the presence of ZnO and TiO is distributed uniformly on ZnO nanorods. TiO/ZnO nanocomposite shows enhanced activity which degrades in 14 min under visible light irradiation. TiO/ZnO catalyst with 5 wt % exhibited the high photocatalytic activity (0.1882 min). It is proposed that a synergistic interaction between ZnO and TiO leads to a charge separation which leads to the enhanced activity.