Development and Evaluation of Ag-TiO2 Nano-photocatalysts for the removal of natural organic matter and pharmaceuticals
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Date
2020-01-08
Authors
Fattahi, Azar
Journal Title
Journal ISSN
Volume Title
Publisher
University of Waterloo
Abstract
Increasing the population and growing industries lead to contamination of surface and
groundwater and threaten the sustainability of aquatic ecosystems and water resources. Some
of the main contributors to water pollution include domestic wastes, industrial discharges, and
excess use of pharmaceuticals and personal care products as well as pesticides and fertilizers.
The incapability of conventional techniques to remove the contaminants has created a need for
innovative water treatment solutions, such as advanced oxidation processes (AOPs).
AOPs are aqueous phase oxidation methods based on the creation of highly reactive chemical
species that mineralize organic pollutants. TiO2 has been widely studied as photocatalysis in
AOPs to remove contaminants in water treatment applications. However, the low efficiency
under solar irradiation and difficulty in recovering photocatalysis have limited its applications
in commercial scale. Doping metals and non-metals to TiO2 structure is a possible mechanism
to increase the efficiency and overcome the limitation of using TiO2 in water treatment
industries.
In the current study, graphene (G) as non-metal and silver (Ag) as a metal dopant were selected
to compare the efficiency of photocatalytic reactions of P25 which is the commercial name of
TiO2.
Description
Keywords
Nano-photocatalysts, Semi-conductors, TiO2 doping, Natural organic matter, pharmaceuticals, water treatment, UV-LED