Abstract
Tremendous amount of research work is going on Titanium dioxide (TiO2) based materials. These materials have many useful applications in our scientific and daily life and it ranges from photovoltaics to photocatalysis to photo-electrochromics, sensors etc.. All these applications can be divided into two broad categories such as environmental (photocatalysis and sensing) and energy (photovoltaics, water splitting, photo-/electrochromics, and hydrogen storage). Synthesis of TiO2 nanoparticles with specific size and structural phase is crucial, for solar sell application. Monodispersed spherical colloids with minimum size variation (5% or less) is essential for the fabrication of photonic crystals. When sensitized with organic dyes or inorganic narrow band gap semiconductors, TiO2 can absorb light into the visible light region and convert solar energy into electrical energy for solar cell applications. TiO2 nanomaterials also have been widely studied for water splitting and hydrogen production due to their suitable electronic band structure given the redox potential of water. Again nano structured TiO2 has extensively been studied for hydrogen storage with good storage capacity and easy releasing procedure. All these issues and related finding will be discussed in this review.