ABSTRACT
Titanium dioxide (TiO2) has attracted considerable attention as a promising inorganic material and an attractive raw material for various applications such as water purification, gas sensing, storage and delivery, and energy generation, due to its versatile advantages such as inexpensiveness, nontoxic nature, stability, and excellent photocatalytic activity. This chapter provides a brief review of titania fabrication, assembly, and application that focuses on the most common TiO2 phases, namely anatase and rutile. The three common polymorphs of titanium dioxide, namely anatase (tetragonal), rutile (tetragonal), and brookite (orthorhombic), are also considered. TiO2 occurs in a variety of crystal structures and exhibits diverse electronic and optical properties. Rutile has been studied extensively because it has the simplest TiO2 structure and the most common and stable TiO2 form. The chapter reviews methods of reducing TiO2 band gap with metallic and nonmetallic species, including ion implantation, sol-gel, and heterostructure methods.
