Low temperature preparation and visible light photocatalytic activity of mesoporous carbon-doped crystalline TiO2

A visible-light-active TiO2 photocatalyst was prepared through carbon doping by using glucose as carbon source. Different from the previous carbon-doped TiO2 prepared at high temperature, our preparation was performed by a hydrothermal method at temperature as low as 160 °C. The resulting photocatalyst was characterized by XRD, XPS, TEM, nitrogen adsorption, and UV–vis diffuse reflectance spectroscopy. The characterizations found that the photocatalyst possessed a homogeneous pore diameter about 8 nm and a high surface area of 126 m2/g. Comparing to undoped TiO2, the carbon-doped TiO2 showed obvious absorption in the 400–450 nm range with a red shift in the band gap transition. It was found that the resulting carbon-doped TiO2 exhibits significantly higher photocatalytic activity than the undoped counterpart and Degussa P25 on the degradation of rhodamine B (RhB) in water under visible light irradiation (λ > 420 nm). This method can be easily scaled up for industrial production of visible-light driven photocatalyst for pollutants removal because of its convenience and energy-saving.