Photocatalytic processes are more and more widely used to remove different pollutants including microorganisms from liquid and gaseous media. However, methods for evaluating the efficiency of photocatalysts at inactivation/disintegration of microorganisms in the liquid film have limitations at predicting their efficiency for microorganism-containing aerosols. The comparison of two types of phot...

Efficient photocatalytic disinfection of Escherichia coli O157:H7 was achieved by using a C70 modified TiO2 (C70-TiO2) hybrid as a photocatalyst under visible light (λ > 420 nm) irradiation. Disinfection experiments showed that 73% of E. coli O157:H7 died within 2 h with a disinfection rate constant of k = 0.01 min(-1), which is three times that measured for TiO2. The mechanism of cell death wa...

Heterogeneous TiO2/Cu2O nanocomposite was synthesized for photocatalysis through surface impregnation in conjunction with the environmentally friendly soft chemical reduction strategy. The detailed structural, compositional, optical and photoelectrochemical properties of the obtained products are analyzed by X-ray diffraction (XRD), transmission electron microscopy (TEM), UV-Vis diffuse refl ec...

Photocatalytic degradation of organic compounds requires photoexcited holes with strong oxidative power in the valence band (VB) of semiconductors. Although numerous types of doped semiconductors, such as nitrogen-doped TiO2, have been studied as visible-light-sensitive photocatalysts, the quantum yields of these materials were very low because of the limited oxidation power of holes in the nit...

The combination of adsorption and photodegradation processes is an effective technique for the removal dye contaminants from water, which motivating development novel adsorbent-photocatalyst materials wastewater treatment. Herein, nanocomposite porous beads were developed using titanium dioxide (TiO2) nanotubes embedded in a sodium alginate (SA)/polyvinylpyrrolidone (PVP) matrix calcium chlorid...

Yellow-colored nitrogen doped TiO2 photocatalyst and a pure TiO2 powder were synthesized via sol-gel method using TiCl4 and urea as raw materials. However, the synthesis procedure for nitrogen doped TiO2 was catalyzed by acid that dialed with controlled precipitation and slow nucleation. According to XRD analysis, the nitrogen doped TiO2 consisted of anatase phase of titania which was a signifi...

Nanotechnology is a field of science that is nowadays developing in a dynamic way. It seems to offer almost endless opportunities of contribution to many areas of economy and human activity, in general. Thanks to nanotechnology, the so-called nanomaterials can be designed. They present structurally altered materials, with their physical, chemical and biological properties entirely differing fro...

Water pollution from emerging contaminants (ECs) or emerging pollutants is an important environmental problem. Heterogeneous photocatalytic treatment, as advanced oxidation treatment of wastewater effluents, has been proposed to solve this problem. In this paper, a heterogeneous photocatalytic process was studied for emergent contaminants removal using paracetamol as a model contaminant molecul...

In this paper, 2wt.% Fe doped TiO2 nanopowder was prepared by a combination of sol-gel and mechanical alloying methods. The mechanical alloying of Fe powder with Ti(OH)4 gel produced from the sol-gel method was used to produce Fe doped TiO2 nanopowder. The synthesized samples were characterized by X-ray diffraction (XRD), field emission scanning electron microscopy (FESEM) and diffuse reflectan...

A ternary nanostructured photocatalyst consisting of ZnO/TiO2/Au was designed to achieve an enhanced solar absorption due to the coupling of surface enhanced plasmonic absorption of metal and semiconductor excitons. TiO2 coated ZnO rods with an aspect ratio of 8-12 were decorated with citrate capped gold nanoparticles for photocatalytic degradation of organic pollutants in simulated waste water...