I swore I posted this yesterday, but there's no sign of it. Thanks to Hillary for prodding me...
Titanium isopropoxide is a Lewis acid and useful in organic synthesis for this reason. It's also useful for synthesis of various titanium compounds.
Another neat thing about Ti(OIPr)4 is that it hydrolyzes into a voluminous precipitate of titanium (IV) oxide (titanium dioxide).
Titanium (IV) isopropoxide's propensity to hydrolyze makes it useful for a number of things - its hydrolysis tends to generate nanoparticulate suspensions.
The fact that it reacts with water so avidly means that it can scavenge water from a reaction that produces it, such as reductive amination. Its Lewis acid character is useful here as well.
TiO2 is useful in its own right and deserves its own entry later. It is hard to overstate its importance in industry; its high index of refraction, low cost, and relative inertness has made it the most common white pigment. This is a boon to paint-chip-eaters everywhere, as well as people who like white paint that stays white, since the older lead pigments were much more toxic as well as not as fast.
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Is this a similar sort of thing to tetraethylorthosilicate and tantalum ethoxide?
We use both making silica gels, but being geochemists, the exact mechanisms of what the organic stuff does is a bit hazy. I just noticed that we were getting low Si totals in gels the last few times...
Low density silica gels (e.g., aerogels vs. xerogels) must fight surface tension collapse when drying. One (expensive, slow) approach is to avoid the meniscus altogether by solvent exchange and critical point drying. Freezing for lyophilization is death with water - expansion, energetic solid-liquid interface, pore water, residual solute concentration in residual liquid phase. One wonders if lyophilization from solvent-exchanged t-butanol, mp=23 C, would pull it off.
The cute fillip is to silanize the wet gel in situ. Capillary rise in wetted hydrophilic pores suddenly becomes capillary exclusion in unweted hydrophobic pores and the gel gushes water to mostly dryness before your eyes. Trimethylsilyl groups can be burned off in air in a furnace to recover active silica surface.
One then posits that transition metal oxide aerogels should be more common. Titania aerogel is interesting for its very high refractive index and vigorous surface oxidative activity given blue light and air. A solid state redox couple given another round of deposition suggests itself.
We want them to collapse- otherwise they take up too much volume. The gel is just an intermediate step to get a homogenous starting substance so that when we melt it, we don't need to wait around for the melt to homogenize via diffusion
Take your alkoxide precursor (mix) and blast it though a burner with air or oxygen. Saves you the energy of removing water. This gives highly dispersed product (re fumed silica). Catching the product can be a royal diddle, so send it directly into the melting furnace.
Titanium white is a good replacement for most consumer paints, but for oil painters lead flake is still the way to go. Apparently lead white has a better ability to cover darker undercoats. Lead paint can still be found, but its in tiny little tubes no good for painting window sills with.
such a nice info i have got regarding the TTIP . It is also used for the TiO2 coating on fabrics and other substrates, for stain resistance, fire resistance and UV protection.
can somebody suggest where is it available?
i m a scientist in India and working in Plasma technology field for such coationg project.
the info will be valuable for me
thanks.