Room-temperature pulsed CVD-grown SiO₂ protective layer on TiO₂ particles for photocatalytic activity suppression

Abstract

This work presents a novel chemical vapor deposition (CVD) approach that enables the deposition of ultrathin and conformal SiO₂ layers on TiO₂ anatase nanoparticles at room temperature using SiCl₄ and air containing water without the use of a catalyst. The morphology of the CVD-grown SiO₂ layers was found to be strongly dependent on the initial surface states of the TiO₂ nanopowders, which could be altered by applying a simple heat pretreatment. The deposition on untreated TiO₂ resulted in granular films, whereas on preheated TiO₂ highly uniform and conformal SiO₂ layers were obtained. By varying the SiCl₄ precursor dosing time and the number of CVD cycles, the thickness of the SiO₂ could be controlled at the nanometer level, which allowed us to investigate the influence of film thickness on the photocatalytic suppression ability. We found that a conformal SiO₂ layer with a thickness of 3 nm could sufficiently suppress the photocatalytic activity of anatase TiO₂ nanoparticles, which was demonstrated by the photodegradation of Rhodamine B. Our approach offers a simple, fast, feasible and low-temperature deposition method which can be directly applied to SiO₂ coating on nanoparticles in pigments and other fields, particularly heat-sensitive materials, and further developed for large-scale production.