Abstract
The study on TiO 2 for wastewater remediation has gained interest among researchers. However, the application of this photocatalyst is limited due to non-recyclability of conventional TiO 2 . Thus, immobilization technique has been developed to solve this issue. Hence, a comparison study between two types of immobilized photocatalysts namely titanium dioxide (TiO 2 ) and TiO 2 mixed with polyvinyl alcohol (PVA) has been conducted in this work to observe the significant effect of PVA polymer in photocatalysis reaction of reactive red 4 (RR4) dye. Double sided adhesive tape (DSAT) was used as thin layer binder in this immobilization system. The result shows that the photocatalytic performance of TiO 2 -PVA/DSAT was higher than that of TiO 2 /DSAT under both normal UV and visible light irradiations due to the conjugated unsaturated polymer from PVA serve as electron donor for TiO 2 thus increase the photocatalysis process. Besides, TiO 2 -PVA/DSAT was also found to possess much better adhesion strength to the support material compared to TiO 2 /DSAT. Based on the findings, this TiO 2 immobilization system is expected to be beneficial in the industrial wastewater treatment. Thus, further study to improve the photocatalytic activity of this immobilized TiO 2 will be in our future work.
Highlights
Advanced oxidation processes (AOPs) have seen to be growing interest recently
A comparison study between two types of immobilized photocatalysts namely titanium dioxide (TiO2) and TiO2 mixed with polyvinyl alcohol (PVA) has been conducted in this work to observe the significant effect of PVA polymer in photocatalysis reaction of reactive red 4 (RR4) dye
The result shows that the photocatalytic performance of TiO2PVA/Double sided adhesive tape (DSAT) was higher than that of TiO2/DSAT under both normal UV and visible light irradiations due to the conjugated unsaturated polymer from PVA serve as electron donor for TiO2 increase the photocatalysis process
Summary
Advanced oxidation processes (AOPs) have seen to be growing interest recently. The practical application of AOPs is commercially known as photocatalysis. Titanium dioxide (TiO2) is the best known phototcatalyst and has been employed in almost studies. Immobilization of TiO2 has been introduced to replace the existing suspension system. This is due to the main drawback from the suspension system that is formation of sludge which requires further purification steps resulting in difficulties to recycle the photocatalyst. Many different methods that have been developed to prepare the immobilized TiO2. Adding polymer as matrices has been widely used by researchers in immobilized TiO2 preparation to produce photocatalyst with better strength, adsorption capability and surface morphology. H-PVA/ TiO2 composite was synthesized by Song et al [8] under sol–gel and thermal treatment process with tetrabutyl titanate as titanium source. The adhesion strength of the photocatalysts was compared through sonication procedure
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