Notice of Retraction Preparation of Amphiphilic Silica-Covered TiO2 Hollow Microspheres and Its Activity for Mythlene Blue Degradation

Notice of Retraction After careful and considered review of the content of this paper by a duly constituted expert committee, this paper has been found to be in violation of IEEE's Publication Principles. We hereby retract the content of this paper. Reasonable effort should be made to remove all past references to this paper. The presenting author of this paper has the option to appeal this decision by contacting TPII@ieee.org. SiO2-void-TiO2 microspheres were successfully prepared by first polymerization of furfuryldehyde and precipitation of silica, and then the mid-layer of polyfurfuryldehyde was removed to create a nanovoid layer between a TiO2 core and silica shell. Then the surfaces of SiO2-void-TiO2 were modified by partial alkylsilylation of n-octadecyltrichlorosilane to render the SiO2-void-TiO2 surface amphiphilic. The as-prepared catalysts were characterized using XRD, HR-TEM, FT-IR and TG-DTA techniques. Results demonstrated that, as-prepared catalysts could be easily located at the boundary of the dual-phase organic-water mixture, due to the introduction of partial hydrophobicity. The photocatalytic experimental results indicated that amphiphilic SiO2-void-TiO2 could operate as an effective photacatalysts to decolorize the methylene blue solution. This new catalyst would promote effective commercial applications due to its more convenient recovery, compared to TiO2 catalysts.