Synthesis of S/Cr doped mesoporous TiO2 with high-active visible light degradation property via solid state reaction route

S/Cr doped mesoporous TiO2 (S-TiO2, Cr-TiO2, S-Cr-TiO2) were successfully synthesized via a simple, effective and environmental benign solid state reaction route. The low angle XRD patterns demonstrated that the resulting samples possess mesostructures. The further characterizations via N2 adsorption–desorption and XPS showed that the typical S/Cr co-doped mesoporous TiO2 (S-Cr-TiO2(5S-5Cr)) possesses mesopore with the high specific surface area of 118.4 m2/g and narrow pore size distribution, and both S and Cr have been incorporated into the lattice of TiO2 with the amounts of 4.16% sulfur and 7.88% chromium, respectively. And Raman spectroscopy shows that the surface of S-Cr-TiO2 (5S-5Cr) material possesses stretching vibrational peaks at ∼709, ∼793 cm−1 are assignable to the Ti-O-Cr, O-Cr (Ti)-OH bonds, respectively. Interestingly, the UV–vis displayed that the absorption regions of S/Cr doped mesoporous TiO2 cover the visible light region. As for the series of S-Cr-TiO2 samples, the absorption region even extends to near infrared region with strong adsorption. Moreover, compared with the pure titanium dioxide (P25-TiO2), the photodegradation properties of bromocresol green (BCG) on the S/Cr doped mesoporous TiO2 showed excellent photocatalytic properties under visible light irradiation. Within 50 min visible light irradiation, 82.6% of the initial BCG was degraded for the S-Cr-TiO2 (6S-4Cr) photocatalyst.