The photocatalytic removal of water contaminants for ecological systems has become essential in the past few decades. Consequently, for commercialization, cost-efficient, earth-abundant and easy to synthesize photocatalysts for dye degradation are of urgent need. We have demonstrated a simple and feasible approach for fabricating TiO₂–SnO₂ nanocomposite photocatalysts via urea-assisted-thermal-decomposition with different mass ratios. The as-synthesized materials were characterized by different physicochemical techniques. The phase formation and crystallite size were calculated by using XRD. The STEM, UV-Vis, DRS, HR-TEM and EDS revealed the effective formation of the heterojunction between TiO₂ and SnO₂, and enrichment in the UV-absorption spectrum. All synthesized materials were used for the photocatalytic degradation of methyl orange (MO) under UV light. The optimized results of the TiO₂–SnO₂ nanocomposite showed excellent photostability and photocatalytic activity over a number of degradation-reaction cycles of methyl-orange (MO) dye under the illumination of ultraviolet light. In addition, the recent method has great potential to be applied as a proficient method for mixed-metal-oxide-nanocomposite synthesis.

In the present work, we have reported a facile and large-scale synthesis of TiO₂ nanoparticles (NPs) through urea-assisted thermal decomposition of titanium oxysulphate. We have successfully synthesized TiO₂ NPs by using this effective route with different weight ratios of titanium oxysulphate: urea. The structures and properties of TiO₂ NPs were confirmed by scanning electron microscope) (SEM), transmission electron microscopy (TEM), thermogravimetric analysis (TGA), fourier transform infrared spectroscopy (FT-IR), ultra violet–visible spectroscopy (UV-vis), and photoluminescence (Pl) techniques. XRD demonstrated that TiO₂ NPs holds of anatase crystal phase with crystallizing size 14–19 nm even after heating at 600 °C. TGA, SEM, and TEM images reveal urea’s role, which controls the size, morphology, and aggregation of TiO₂ NPs during the thermal decomposition. These TiO₂ NPs were employed for photodegradation of Methyl Orange (MO) in the presence of ultraviolet (UV) radiation. An interesting find was that the TiO₂ NPs exhibited better photocatalytic activity and excellent recycling stability over several photodegradation cycles. Furthermore, the present method has a great perspective to be used as an efficient method for large-scale synthesis of TiO₂ NPs.

In this work, we developed a very simple and novel approach for synthesizing TiO₂-ZnO nanocomposites via the urea-assisted thermal decomposition of titanium oxysulphate and zinc acetate at different weight ratios. The synthesized nanocomposite samples were studied by means of HR-TEM, XRD, STEM, UV–Vis DRS, PL and EDS. The observed results demonstrate that the TiO₂-ZnO nanocomposite consists of an anatase crystal phase of TiO₂ with a crystallite size of 10–15 nm. Combined characterization, including UV–Vis DRS, STEM, EDS and HR-TEM, revealed the successful formation of a heterojunction between TiO₂ and ZnO and an improvement in UV spectrum absorption. The photocatalytic activity was explored using MO degradation under ultraviolet light illumination. The results of the optimized TiO₂-ZnO nanocomposite show excellent photocatalytic activity and photostability over a number of degradation reaction cycles. In addition, the current approach has immense potential to be used as a proficient method for synthesizing mixed metal oxide nanocomposites.