Fabrication and characterization of CoTiO3 nanofibers by sol-gel assisted electrospinning

Continuous CoTiO3 nanofibers have been successfully synthesized by a sol-gel assisted electrospinning method followed by calcination at 600 C in air. The scanning electron microscopy (SEM) results reveal that the obtained CoTiO3 nanofibers are 220 nm in diameter and several micrometers in length. The X-ray diffraction (XRD) analysis shows that the nanofibers possess highly crystalline structure without any impurity phase. In contrast, the CoTiO3 nanoparticles synthesized at the identical conditions by a sol-gel route have impurities including Co3O4 and TiO2. Moreover, the electrospun CoTiO3 nanofibers are endowed with a higher specific surface area compared with the nanoparticle counterparts, which results from the regular one dimensional (1D) morphology without any detectable agglomeration and a rough surface. (C) 2014 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.