Structural and morphological characterization of tea-waste-derived carbon/TiO2 (AT–TiO2) composites prepared by solvent-assisted solid-state dispersion
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Abstract
Tea waste is an abundant agro-industrial residue but its valorization into functional inorganic composites remains largely unexplored. In this study, the waste was torrefied at 230 °C and combined with commercial TiO2 by a solvent-assisted solid-state dispersion route followed by calcination at 500 °C, giving a Tea-Waste-Derived carbon/ TiO2 material denoted AT– TiO2. A total of 3 AT: TiO2 mass ratios (9:1, 8:2 and 7:3) were prepared with pure AT and pure TiO2 controls processed identically, and characterized by XRD and SEM–EDS. XRD results showed that single-phase rutile retained its structure in every composite, with no peak shift and secondary phase. The carbon content was obtained in EDS pattern, due to the effect of using ethanol as a composite solvent. Scherrer analysis of the (110) reflection gave apparent crystallite sizes of 61, 34, 61, and 49 nm for pure TiO2 as well as the 9:1, 8:2 and 7:3 composites. SEM image analysis of 60 objects per sample, fitted to a log-normal distribution, gave median agglomerate sizes of 11.99 ± 0.51, 2.96 ± 0.32, 9.91 ± 0.74, 5.97 ± 0.66 and 11.00 ± 0.81 µm respectively. The 8:2 composite showed both the smallest median and the narrowest distribution (geometric standard deviation 1.56), indicating the most uniform dispersion. This study can serve as the basis for the development of biomass–inorganic composite materials with the potential to be applied in the fields of environmentally friendly adsorption and photocatalysis.
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This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License.
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