engleski

Improving photocatalytic performance of immobilised nanostructured titanium dioxide thin- films by Cu nanoparticles modification

Titanium dioxide is a widespread photocatalytic material known for its stability, non-toxicity abundancy in addition to excellent photocatalytic performance. Maybe the only drawback of titanium dioxide is found in a wide bandgap located in the UV part of the spectra, but workarounds are found in unit cell interventions by doping, in surface modifications, etc. In this work we prepared thin-films of vertically ordered nanostructured titanium dioxide by a facile low-cost electrochemical anodization method, which had their surfaces decorated by copper nanoparticles using different methods (wet- chemistry deposition and hydrothermal synthesis). All of the samples were thoroughly morphologically (scanning electron microscopy with energy dispersive X-ray spectroscopy) and structurally (X-ray diffraction and Raman spectroscopy) characterized. The objective was to investigate how the selected course of Cu modifications of the titanium dioxide photocatalyst improves the degradation of the model pollutant 1 H benzotriazole (BT). The best results were achieved for the samples modified with spin coating deposition (0.5 M concentration of Cu) which showed a 3.5x times increase in the BT degradation compared to unmodified titanium dioxide sample. Overall, immobilised thin-films proved efficient, stable, easily removable after the experiment and viable for upscaling and industrial application.

titanium oxide ; thin-films ; nanostructured ; benzotriazole

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