Auto-combustion synthesis of lanthanum-doped TiO₂ nanostructures for efficient photocatalytic degradation of crystal violet dye

ABSTRACT

Utilising the solution combustion technique, nanocrystalline photocatalysts that included both pristine TiO₂ and doped TiO₂ with various La (III) dopant percentages (1, 3, 5, and 7 mol%) were created. Different methods, including thermal analysis, high resolution-transmission electron microscopy (HR-TEM), X-ray diffractometer (XRD), Fourier transform infrared spectroscopy (FT-IR), and field-emission scanning electron microscopy (FE-SEM), were used to investigate the prepared nanostructures. The XRD results indicated the anatase form and the crystalline nature of the products (pristine and doped TiO₂) in the size range of a crystallite (5–16.5) nm. The photocatalytic assessment of the prepared nano-photocatalysts was carried out by crystal violet (CV) decolourisation under ultraviolet (UV) light. The findings revealed that 3% La-TiO₂ showed the highest degradation efficiency (95.98%) in 70 min with a pseudo-first-rate constant of k = 4.73 × 10⁻² min⁻¹, compared to pristine TiO₂ and the other TiO₂ nanostructures with various La (III) dopant ratios.

KEYWORDS:

• Photocatalytic degradation
• TiO₂
• lanthanum-doped TiO₂
• crystal violet
• kinetics

Disclosure statement

All authors state that they are not aware of any financial or interpersonal conflicts that would have appeared to have an impact on the study described in this article.

Data availability statement

This article provides figures and tables to illustrate the results of this research.

Contributions of the authors

This work was collaboratively completed by all of the authors. Each author read and approved the final draught.