Standard Method for the Determination of the Photocatalytic Activity of Titanium Dioxide TiO2 in a Black Body Reactor

Abstract

Synthesis of semiconductors to be used as photocatalysis, solar fuels attracts a wide attention since semiconductors photocatalyst are the most effective techniques to harvest solar light for environmental remediation. To determine the activity of a semiconducting photocatalyst is by imploying a black body photoreactor,where is the reaction rate defined as the converted amount of a probe molecule per unit time (dn/dt).measuring the reaction rate of a probe compound with the same type of photoreactor to compare the activities of photocatalysts under identical irradiation conditions is a very general way. The black body like a reactor is a new practical application to measure the quantum yields of photochemical reactions (Φ) in liquid-solid heterogeneous systems. One of the most major advantage of this new method, it is too simple to determine the photocatalytic activity of a photocatalysts such as the TiO2 as long as the fraction of the reflected and transmitted light are negligible due to the reactor geometry and high optical density of the heterogeneous systems. The quantum yields of the hetrogeneous system is a direct reaction since there is a lack of reliable experimental methods which make the determination at any photocatalytic laboratories very easy. The quantum yields are defined as the number of molecules of a given reactant per photon of light absorbed by photocatalyst at a given wavelength.