Immobilization of TiO2 nanofibers on reduced graphene sheets: Novel strategy in electrospinning

Abstract

A simple and efficient approach is developed to immobilize TiO2 nanofibers onto reduced graphene oxide (RGO) sheets. Here, TiO2 nanofiber-intercalated RGO sheets are readily produced by two-step procedure involving the use of electrospinning process to fabricate TiO2 precursor containing polymeric fibers on the surface of GO sheets, followed by simultaneous TiO2 nanofibers formation and GO reduction by calcinations. GO sheets deposited on the collector during electrospinning/electrospray can act as substrate on to which TiO2 precursor containing polymer nanofibers can be deposited which give TiO2 NFs doped RGO sheets on calcinations. Formation of corrugated structure cavities of graphene sheets decorated with TiO2 nanofibers on their surface demonstrates that our method constitutes an alternative top-down strategy toward fabricating verities of nanofiber-decorated graphene sheets. It was found that the synthesized TiO2/RGO composite revealed a remarkable increased in photocatalytic activity compared to pristine TiO2 nanofibers. Therefore, engineering of TiO2 nanofiber-intercalated RGO sheets using proposed facile technique can be considered a promising method for catalytic and other applications.

Keywords: Electrospinning; Reduced graphene oxide; TiO(2) nanofibers.