Developmment Of Hydroxypropyl Cellulose-Fe-Doped Nano-Tio2 Photocatalyst : Synthesis, Characterization And Activity Test
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Date
2011-03
Authors
Teh, Chao Min
Journal Title
Journal ISSN
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Publisher
Universiti Sains Malaysia
Abstract
Water pollution by organic pollutants is an ever increasing problem for the global concerns. Therefore, it is important to degrade these pollutants completely before they are discharged to the environment. Most of the pollutants cannot be effectively degraded by conventional techniques such as flocculation, precipitation, adsorption, membrane separation, etc. Thus, advanced oxidation processes (AOP’s) become one of the superior methods used and widely studied for the degradation these organic pollutants. Heterogeneous photocatalysis using nano-TiO2 as the photocatalyst was studied in this project. Nano-TiO2 was successfully prepared using acid-catalyzed sol-gel method and the as-synthesized photocatalyst was characterized using Brunauer-Emmett-Teller (BET), X-ray diffraction (XRD), transmission electron microscopy (TEM) and UV-Vis diffuse reflectance spectroscopy (UV-Vis DRS). Photocatalytic activity of the prepared TiO2 was tested by the photodegradation of phenol solution in a batch reactor. Hydroxypropyl cellulose (HPC) was added into the TiO2 during the sol preparation as surfactant. Addition of 1g/L of HPC into the TiO2 was found to successfully reduce the particles agglomeration and resulted in TiO2 with higher surface area which showed better photocatalytic activity in comparison to TiO2 without surfactant and commercial available TiO2 Degussa P-25. Effect of metal doping was studied by doping TiO2 with Fe3+. 0.25 wt% of Fe3+ was found to be the optimum dopant concentration. Response surface methodology (RSM) based on Box-Behnken design (BBD) was
used to evaluate the effects of operating parameters. Photocatalyst concentration = 0.94g/L, phenol concentration = 10.48mg/L and Fe3+ concentration = 0.25 wt% are the optimum conditions for photodegradation of phenol. The prepared photocatalyst successfully decomposed 98.24% and 85.0% of phenol in near UV (λ = 365nm) and direct solar light illumination, respectively.
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Keywords
Developmment of hydroxypropyl cellulose , characterization and activity test