Fighting poison with poison: Degradation of ethyl paraben by Bi2Ti2O7-TiO2 doped with ethyl paraben

Abstract

In this paper, a variety of titanium-bismuth-based composite photocatalysts were prepared by molecularly imprinted sol–gel method using ethyl paraben (EP) as the target pollutant and tetra-n-butyl titanate as the precursor for the degradation of EP. The photocatalytic removal of 81.4 % of 10 mg/L EP wastewater was achieved by synthesising Bi-EP-TiO2 for 30 min at 500 °C, 5 g Bi and 2 g EP. The main component of the prepared Bi-EP-TiO2 and Bi-TiO2 is Bi2Ti2O7-TiO2. In addition, the forbidden bandwidth of Bi-EP-TiO2 is 0.28 eV larger than that of Bi-TiO2 but 0.30 eV smaller than that of TiO2, which suggests that, compared with TiO2, Bi-EP-TiO2 requires a lower electron-leap energy, and thus is capable of generating more This suggests that Bi-EP-TiO2 requires lower electron transition energy than TiO2, and therefore can generate more photogenerated electron holes, thus improving the catalytic efficiency. Hence, Bi2Ti2O7-TiO2 doped with ethyl paraben degrades ethyl paraben with excellent performance.