Water is a crucial resource for life but only 3% of the global amount is available as fresh water. In the past decades with the rapid growth population and the intensive industrial activities, the waste water treatment has become a hot research topic. Heterogeneous photocatalysis provides a potential green solution due to its advantages over the traditional techniques, as it harnesses the power of natural sunlight and it can oxide pollutants in the ppb range. An improvement in the photodegradation performance for organic model pollutants (i.e., dyes) in water due to the utilization of hierarchical ordered supported photocatalyst is reported herein. Porous silica with hierarchical macroporous and mesoporous architectures (MacroMeso-SBA-15) was prepared as scaffold to deposit ultra-thin titania films, offering greater control of the overall photocatalyst architecture with high surface area (~500 m<sup>2</sup>/g). The highest activity for the Ti-mesoSBA-15 and the Ti-Macro/meso-SBA-15 at the monolayer was explained in terms of the combined factors, such as the highest surface area with largest number of active sites available for the interaction between catalyst and reactant and the bigger mesopore size (~6 nm) with greatest accessibility of photo-oxidative sites. Over the two series, the Ti-Macro/meso-SBA-15 provides a greater diffusion of reactant molecules to/from catalytic sites, an increase in adsorption capability and an enhancement of light harvesting connected with the scattering effect introduced by the macropores showing higher photoactivity compare to the no supported anatase.

Design of hierarchical photocatalyst for waste water treatment

253rd National Meeting (2017)

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