Abstract

• The study was designed to study the effect of copper doping of TiO2 with three different copper concentrations and calcined at 500 to 800 °C for 2 hours on the anatase-rutile phase transition and composition. The prepared powder samples were characterized by X-ray Diffraction (XRD), Energy Dispersive X- ray Fluorescence (EDXRF), Scanning Electron Microscopy-Energy Dispersive X-ray Spectroscopy (SEM-EDX). The XRD results suggested that the pure TiO2 powder calcined at 500 °C was in 100 % anatase phase, whereas these materials transformed the mixing of a few anatase phases and mainly rutile phases at 600 °C. Therefore, the phase transition temperature of TiO2 in this preparation method was 600 °C. The average crystallite sizes of prepared TiO2 materials by XRD analysis were in the range of 25.50 to 96.39 nm. The average crystallite sizes increased with increasing calcined temperature. The associated work of this research is the addition of CuSO4 to the crystal structure of TiO2 synthesized by the sol-gel method using titanium(IV) isopropoxide, isopropanol, and copper(II) sulphate, and calcined at 500 to 800 °C. The XRD results of prepared Cu-doped TiO2 materials described the anatase phase at 500°C and 600 °C, and the mixing of a few anatase phase and mainly rutile phase for Cu-doped TiO2 nanoparticles at 700 °C. Therefore, the phase transition temperature of Cu-doped TiO2 nanoparticles was 700 °C. The synthesized Cu-doped TiO2 materials were fully transformed to the rutile phase at 800 C. The average crystallite size of Cu-doped TiO2 materials was in the range of 25.67 to 45.49 nm. The XRD study revealed that all the prepared samples have tetragonal crystal structures that were not changed through the doping process.