2012/10/01 by Diana Mardare, Abdullah Yildiz, A. Yıldız +9 · 2 citations
Chemistry · Energy · Engineering · #Advanced Photocatalysis Techniques #Amorphous solid #Analytical Chemistry (journal) #Band gap #Chemical engineering #Chemistry #Composite material #Contact angle #Crystallography #Gas Sensing Nanomaterials and Sensors #Materials science #Nanotechnology #Optoelectronics #Surface roughness #Thin film #TiO2 Photocatalysis and Solar Cells #Wetting #X-ray photoelectron spectroscopy
paper · doi:10.1063/1.4757007
openalex publication_date 2012/10/01 · openalex created_date 2025/10/10 · openalex updated_date 2026/07/28
TiO2 and TiO2/Nb amorphous thin films were grown on glass substrates by a sol-gel technique (spin coating). Films' surface composition, structure, and morphology were derived from x-ray photoelectron spectroscopy, x-ray diffraction, and atomic force microscopy data. The investigated films showed a smooth surface (roughness values below 5 nm). A separate surface wettability investigation showed that by increasing the Nb amount in pristine titania films results in a decrease of contact angle (CA) values from 40° to nearly 0°, thus, indicating a super-hydrophilic conversion under UV illumination. This conversion rate is greatly enhanced by increasing the Nb content, the surface super-hydrophilic behavior occurring after a couple of minutes in the TiO2/Nb samples, but after 4 h in the pristine titania specimen. The current results are discussed in terms of the optical band gap shift towards higher energies, by increasing the Nb content in the films, a process explained based on small polaron hopping model.