Abstract
The elimination of volatile organic compounds (VOCs) at low concentration is a subject of great interest because these compounds are very harmful for the environment and human health. In this work, we have developed a synthesis methodology of TiO2 that allows obtaining meso-macroporous materials with hierarchical porosity and with high thermal stability for their application as photocatalysts in the removal of VOCs, specifically propene. The materials synthesized in this work were characterized by Scanning electron microscope (SEM), Transmission electron microscopy (TEM), powder X-ray diffraction (XRD), Thermogravimetric Analysis (TG), and nitrogen adsorption. It is observed that the samples calcined at 250 °C and 500 °C present a high photoactivity for the photooxidation of propene, which is similar to the benchmark material P25 (commercial TiO2). Moreover, the textural properties are better than those for P25, indicating that the samples are interesting for the preparation of photocatalysts with different conformations, such as in the form of coatings and fillings in different size scales.
Highlights
At present, the removal of volatile organic compounds (VOCs) at low concentrations is still a hot topic, because these compounds are very harmful to the environment and human health.These pollutants cause carcinogenic effects, problems in the central nervous system and climate change, among several other adverse effects [1,2].Among the different VOCs, the removal of propene is interesting because this contaminant is considered a highly reactive volatile organic compound (HRVOC) which is involved in the formation of ground-level and tropospheric ozone and, in photochemical smog [3,4].This contaminant appears in vehicle emissions and in many industrial applications, such as petrochemical plants, cigarette smoke, and others [5,6]
As some authors have reported in the literature, the temperature up to which the anatase phase is stable is around 500 ◦ C [30]
The anatase-to-rutile transformation occurs in a significantly higher temperature range, between 700 ◦ C and 900 ◦ C, which indicates a very high thermal stability for the TiO2 samples prepared in this work
Summary
Among the different VOCs, the removal of propene is interesting because this contaminant is considered a highly reactive volatile organic compound (HRVOC) which is involved in the formation of ground-level and tropospheric ozone and, in photochemical smog [3,4]. This contaminant appears in vehicle emissions and in many industrial applications, such as petrochemical plants, cigarette smoke, and others [5,6]. A wide variety of semiconductors has been studied as photocatalysts, such as ZnO [8], CdS [9] and, most noticeably, TiO2 [10,11,12]
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