Surface photoinduced charge separation and photocatalytic activity of Sn doped TiO2 nanoparticles

In this paper, different Sn doped TiO2 nanoparticles were prepared by a sol-gel method, and were mainly characterized by surface photovoltage spectrscopy(SPS) and photoluminescence spectroscopy (PL). The photocatalytic activity of the as-prepared samples was evaluated by degrading the phenol solution. The effects of the calcination temperature and doping Sn content on the separation of surface photoinduced charge carriers and photocatalytic activity of TiO2 nanoparticles were discussed, and the modification mechanisms of Sn were analysed. The results showed that the appropriate content of Sn dopant could effectively promote the separation of surface photoinduced charge carrier of TiO2 nanoparticles calcined at appropriate temperature, which was responsible for the remarkable increase in photocatalytic activity.