Materiali fotoattivi nanostrutturati: sintesi, caratterizzazioni e applicazioni.

Titanium dioxide is suitable to answer some important needs of our society, particularly in the environmental field, as a photo catalyst, and in the energy field, for realization of devices for a rational use of solar energy. Thanks to nanotechnology, this material has found a renewed interest by the scientific community for innovative properties that occur as a result of its nanoscale. The materials based on titanium dioxide produced in this work were obtained by sol-gel method, which is now one of the most studied techniques for the synthesis of nanostructured materials. The interest stimulated by this method is its extreme versatility and advantages of ease of control of process parameters. Specifically, samples were synthesized containing either only titanium dioxide, or inorganic hybrid silica / titania. The reasons that led to the trial presented here lie in understanding the influence of experimental parameters (composition, temperature, time) that govern the synthesis process on nature and structural characteristics of the material isolated. Morphology, crystallinity and micro-structure, have been investigated by X-ray Powder Diffraction (XRPD), Nitrogen Physisorption, Atomic Force Microscope (AFM) and Debye Function Analysis (DFA). We also correlated the effect of experimental and structural aspects on the functional properties (photocatalytic activity) of the synthesized materials. Another important aspect of this work concerns the investigation of the application of the materials produced for the surface modification of textile substrates (polyester) in order to obtain "smart textiles" that can effectively reduce environmental pollutants. In this area we investigated the effects of variation of process parameters on the performance exhibited by functionalized textiles.