Recobrimento de Superfícies metálicas por Filmes de Titânia meso-macroporosa

Abstract

Improvement of porous materials has been one of the goals of nanotechnology. There is an increasingly real need to understand the mechanisms that generate self-structured materials specifically those that originate from colloidal particle templates such as: polymers, silica, titania and silicon. These templates are important to produce devices with industrial applications such as: solar cells, desalinizers, batteries and photonic crystals. One of the main difficulties encountered in the application of colloidal particles is to produce them on a large scale with uniform size and deposit them on flat surfaces so that they can homogeneously cover a substrate forming crystallographic domains on a micrometric scale. The objective of this work is to analyze the formation of nanocrystalline films of titania on metallic surfaces that were characterized by scanning electron microscopy (SEM). The metallic substrates were commercial steel plates found in hardware stores. The substrate was covered with latex beads infiltrated by a precursor solution of titania and subsequently heat treated in a tubular oven at 600 ^oC for one hour. It is observed that the metallic substrate influences the topography of the mesoporous titania film resulting in a lamellar structure in which  interaction with the external environment is suitable. These results show that the nature of the substrate directly influences the topography of the mesoporous titania, which is no longer hexagonal with ordered pores but lamellar allowing the production of self-cleaning membranes with direct application in civil construction.