An economic approach to produce iron doped TiO2 nanorods from ilmenite for photocatalytic applications

Titanium dioxide (TiO2) is one of the most promising photocatalytic materials, but its practical applications are always limited since it could only be excited in UV range and has low efficiency due to wide band gap fast recombination rate. To overcome these problems, transition metals have been used as dopants improve performance titanium dioxide. However, previous investigations shown that doping by hydrothermal, sol-gel or other synthetic pathways catalyst synthesis difficult scale-up for mass production. In this work, ilmenite (FeTiO3), abundant mineral, was raw material produce iron-doped oxide nanorods an economic acid treatment approach. Compared with commercial nanomaterials, Rhodamine B (RHB) degradation as-prepared materials were significantly improved activated visible light irradiation. The results from characterization also show rate modified iron dopant. This work provides a possible method which can reduce cost producing doped TiO2 high yield applications.