A facile coating method to construct uniform porous α-Fe₂O₃@TiO₂ core-shell nanostructures with enhanced solar light photocatalytic activity

A new synthetic approach has been developed to prepareα-Fe₂O₃@TiO₂ core-shell nanostructures at ambient conditions (e.g., in water, ≤100 °C). This approach shows a few unique features, including: short reaction time (a few minutes) for forming core-shell nanostructures, no requirement of high temperature calcinations for generating TiO₂ (e.g., at 80–100 °C), tunable TiO₂ shell thickness, high yield and good reproducibility. The experimental results show that the α-Fe₂O₃@TiO₂ core-shell nanostructures exhibit enhanced photocatalytic activity compared to the pure TiO₂ and pure Fe₂O₃ in degradation of organic dye molecules with solar light irradiation. This could be attributed to the large surface area of TiO₂ nanoparticles for maximum harvesting light adsorption, enhanced visible light absorption, and the effective charge separation at the heterojunction of α-Fe₂O₃ and TiO₂. The findings may open a new strategy to synthesize TiO₂-based photocatalysts with enhanced efficiency for environmental remediation applications.