Research Article Rapid Formation of 1D Titanate Nanotubes Using Alkaline Hydrothermal Treatment and Its Photocatalytic Performance Chin Wei Lai, Sharifah Bee Abd Hamid, Tong Ling Tan, and Wai Hong Lee Nanotechnology & Catalysis Research Centre (NANOCAT), University of Malaya, Institute of Graduate Studies Building, 50603 Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia Correspondence should be addressed to Chin Wei Lai; cwlai@um.edu.my Received 11 December 2014; Revised 29 January 2015; Accepted 2 February 2015 Academic Editor: Cheol-Min Park Copyright © 2015 Chin Wei Lai et al. his is an open access article distributed under the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited. One-dimensional (1D) titanate nanotubes (TNT) were successfully synthesized using alkaline hydrothermal treatment of commercial TiO 2 nanopowders in a Telon lined stainless steel autoclave at 150 ∘ C. he minimum time required for the formation of the titanate nanotubes was 9 h signiicantly. Ater the hydrothermal processing, the layered titanate was washed with acid and water in order to control the amount of Na + ions remaining in the sample solutions. In this study, the efect of diferent reaction durations in a range of 3 h to 24 h on the formation of nanotubes was carried out. As the reaction duration is extended, the changes in structure from particle to tubular shapes of alkaline treated TiO 2 were obtained via scanning electron microscope (SEM). Also, the signiicant impact on the phase transformation and crystal structure of TNT was characterized through XRD and Raman analysis. Indeed, the photocatalytic activity of TNT was investigated through the degradation of methyl orange aqueous solution under the ultraviolet light irradiation. As a result, TNT with reaction duration at 6 h has a better photocatalytic performance than other samples which was correlated to the higher crystallinity of the samples as shown in XRD patterns. 1. Introduction Nowadays, various kinds of environmental contaminants are around all of us, especially organic and inorganic pollutants from industrial textile [1]. In fact, textile industry with the discharge of synthetic dyes-containing eluents into the water system can cause considerable environmental pollution which would gravely impact the quality of life of humans [2–4]. For instance, methyl orange acts as one of the major chemical classes of azo dyes that is normally carcinogenic, toxic, and mutagenic in nature [5, 6]. hus, the treatments of such wastewater have become a major concern and it is urgent to develop a sustainable and cost-efective treatment tech- nology to solve the discharge of toxic chemicals into water systems [6–8]. Lately, photocatalytic oxidation treatment has attracted much attention from science community as one of the efective treatments applied for dye removal from textile eluents [9, 10]. In this case, titanium dioxide (TiO 2 ) based nanomaterials have been studied extensively as a cheap and promising photocatalyst for environmental remediation [2, 4, 6]. he reason for using TiO 2 is mainly attributed to its ability to break down complex molecules in the pollutant into simple and non-toxic substances during the photocatalytic oxidation treatment; thus, no second treatment was involved for processing the sludge. Furthermore, the catalyst remains unchanged and can be reused which results in a signiicantly lower operating expense [7–9]. To date, designing one-dimensional (1D) nanostructure assemblies with precisely controllable nanoscale features has gained signiicant scientiic interest, such as nanotubes, nanowires, and nanorods [11–15]. Of such properties, the large surface-to-volume ratio, good ion-changeable ability, and the tube-like structures of TNT have become the major interest of study [3, 8, 16–18]. In addition to this, a few studies showed that TNT exhibits a better photocatalytic activity than the titania nanopowders which have been summarized in Table 1. TNT consists of edge- and corner- sharing TiO 6 octahedral with the Na + ions that existed between the TiO 6 layers which are capable of good ion- changeable ability efective for photocatalysts applications [7, 9, 11]. Hindawi Publishing Corporation Journal of Nanomaterials Volume 2015, Article ID 145360, 7 pages http://dx.doi.org/10.1155/2015/145360