Wastewater treatment by sonophotocatalysis using PEG modified TiO2 film in a circular Photocatalytic-Ultrasonic system

Abstract

TiO2 photocatalyst film recently has been utilized as the potential candidate for the wastewater treatment, due to its high stability and low toxicity. In order to further increase the photocatalytic ability and stability, different molecular weight of polyethylene glycol (PEG) were used to modify TiO2 structure to synthesize porous thin film used in the developed Photocatalytic-Ultrasonic system in this work. The results showed that PEG2000 modified TiO2 calcinated under 450°C for 2h exhibited the highest photocatalytic activity, attributed to the smallest crystallite size and optimal particle size. Over 95.0% of rhodamine B (Rh B) was photocatalytically degraded by optimized PEG2000-TiO2 film after 60min of UV irradiation, while only about 50.8% of Rh B was decolored over pure TiO2 film. Furthermore, optimized PEG2000-TiO2 film was used in a circular Photocatalytic-Ultrasonic system, and the obtained synergy (0.6519) of sonophotocatalysis indicated its extremely high efficiency for Rh B degradation. In this Photocatalytic-Ultrasonic system, larger amount of PEG2000-TiO2 coated glass beads, stronger ultrasonic power and longer experimental time could result to higher degradation efficiency of Rh B. In addition, repetitive experiments showed that about 97.2% of Rh B were still degraded in the fifth experiment by sonophotocatalysis using PEG2000-TiO2 film. Therefore, PEG2000-TiO2 film used in Photocatalytic-Ultrasonic system has promising potential for wastewater treatment, due to its excellent photocatalytic activity and high stability.