Fabrication and characteristics of three-dimensional flower-like titanate nanostructures

A novel and facile approach has been developed to fabricate three-dimension (3D) flower-like titanate nanostructures from Ti powders. The synthesized flower-like titanate nanostructures were composed of many thin nanoribbons and have an ultrahigh specific surface area of 572.3 m2/g. After high temperature heat treatment, the flower-like titanate nanostructures were totally transformed into corresponding anatase TiO2 nanostructures without destroying their 3D hierarchical structural motif. The flower-like TiO2 nanostructures exhibited high photocatalytic activity for photodecomposition of methyl blue, and they could possibly be further used in photovoltaic cell, sensors, Li-ion batteries, and so on.