Abstract
Water pollution is a growing global issue; there are many approaches to treating wastewater, including chemical coagulation, physical adsorption, and chemical oxidation. The photocatalysis process has provided a solution for removing pollutants from wastewater, where the pair of the photoelectron and hole works through an asymmetric way to degrade the contaminants under UV irradiation. This method offers an alternative route for treating the pollutant with a lower energy cost, high efficiency, and fewer byproducts. A continuous-flow microfluidic reactor has a channel size from tens to thousands of micrometers, providing uniform irradiation and short diffusion length. It can enhance the conversion efficiency of photocatalysis due to the simple spatial symmetry inside the microreactor channel and among the individual channels. In addition, the bandgap of TiO2, ZnO, or other photocatalyst nanoparticles with symmetric crystal structure can be modified through doping or embedding. In this mini-review, a review of the reported continuous-flow photocatalytic microfluidic reactor is discussed from the perspective of both microreactor design and material engineering.
Highlights
Water is an essential natural resource for the whole of earth’s ecosystem, covering more than 70% of the earth’s surface
Zuodissolved et al proposed comprehensive sive form strategy heavy metalwith treatment by microbe-photocatalyst hybrids (MPH): using heavy a metal ions to synstrategy for heavy metal treatment by the MPH: using dissolved heavy metal synthesize thesize the photocatalyst, reducing heavy metal ions that are toxicions in to high valence the photocatalyst, reducing the heavy metal ions that are toxic in high valence states such states such as Cr and Se, and using heavy metal ions that are toxic in low valence states
The results indicate that channel with the flow decrease the
Summary
Water is an essential natural resource for the whole of earth’s ecosystem, covering more than 70% of the earth’s surface. High-level pollutants in wastewater from in-creased human activities must be separated or made harmless before discharge into streams or before reuse. Heavy metals such as lead (Pb), mercury (Hg), cadmium (Cd), copper (Cu), and arsenic (As) can cause severe health damage to both aquatic organisms and humans. The photocatalysis process provides an alternative solution to remove the contaminants in the wastewater with benefits of a lower energy cost, high efficiency in destroying the organic dyes, and less byproduct waste. The microfluidic-based photocatalytic reactor, with some inherent advantages of the microreactor system, such as the high surface-to-volume ratio, short diffusion distances, and rapid mass transfer, has improved the photocatalytic performance degrading organic contaminants [23,24]. Understanding reactor and catalyst design principles can help researchers develop more efficient microfluidic-based photocatalytic reactors to treat aqueous contaminants
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