Hydrothermal synthesis and characterization of nickel doped potassium titanate

摘要

The potassium titanate nanowires doped with nickel using nickel chloride as dopant are synthesized by hydrothermal method. These synthesized structures are then characterized by XRD, SEM and TEM and the dopant concentrations are estimated by EDS. The XRD characterization of samples shows that the product formed is mainly Ksub2/subTisub6/subOsub13/sub. The nanowires/fibres of the Ksub2/subTisub6/subOsub13/sub are formed having length up to 20 microns and thickness of about 20 nm. The TEM imaging confirms the formation of uniform internal structures of all nanowires however the inner structure of nickel doped samples are denser in comparison to the undoped samples. The annealing of synthesized nanowires at temperatures in the range of 600-1000 °C modifies their crystal structure. The EDS results have shown that the measured Ni doping concentration in all samples is about four times higher than the expected values. Therefore the possibility of chemical bonding or trapping of nickel atoms in the structure cannot be ruled out. The UV-Vis and Raman spectra of the doped samples are compared with that of un-doped samples. In present work, the use of nickel chloride as dopant in potassium titanate using hydrothermal method is reported for the first time.