Short Communication Synthesis of Spherical TiO2 Made up of High Reactive Facets of (001)

Recently, TiO2 crystals with high reactive facets of (001) have attracted much attention. However, there is less reports on spherical TiO2 exposing high reactive (001) facets. In this paper, we synthesized spherical TiO2 made up of crystallites with high percentage of (001) facets by a simple one-step hydrothermal template process. The spherical SiO2 were used as templates. The effect of the reaction time on the structures and morphologies were systematically investigated. The structures and morphologies of the as-synthesized samples were characterized by X-ray diffractometer (XRD) and scanning electron microscopy (SEM). Energy-dispersive spectroscopy (EDS) was employed to determine the final stoichiometry of the samples. The results showed that spherical TiO2 were of anatase phase, the spheres were about 1.5µm in diameter and the composed TiO2 (001) facets were of <1µm in length