Contamination from antibiotics residue has become one of the most serious threat to water environment. At present, some methods have been used to remove tetracycline antibiotics from aqueous solution, mainly including ion exchange, anaerobic digestion, nanofiltration, adsorption, reverse osmosis, ultrafiltration, ozonation, semiconductor photocatalysis, photo-Fenton, electrochemical oxidation, etc. However, majority of them had some disadvantages during the application process, which hindered further applied in real project for antibiotics removal. Therefore, searching for more ecological, economical and effective methods for tetracycline antibiotics from aqueous solution is of great significant. Semiconductor photocatalysis, regarded as one of the green and sustainable methods to address the energy and environmental crisis, has been widely applied in organic pollutants degradation. Numerous studies with different kinds of photocatalysts have been conducted for tetracycline antibiotics degradation in aqueous solution. Therein, TiO2 is the most commonly used photocatalyst due to its stable properties, low production cost and simple synthetic processes. For tetracycline (TC) photodegradation by pure TiO2-P25, previous studies were only focused on its degradation under UV light irradiation, and the degradation mechanisms controlling UV-light photocatalysis were better understood than those for visible-light processes due to its high optical absorption UV-light region, its degradation effect and mechanisms under visible light irradiation was still unclear. The major goals of this study are to characterize the mechanism, kinetics, and byproducts of tetracycline transformation via visible-light photocatalysis by using pure TiO2-P25, and compare results with UV photocatalysis under the same conditions, which can expand utilization of TiO2-P25 for TC photodegradation to visible light region. The results revealed that higher TC removal efficiency (94.8%) and degradation rate (0.02332 min-1) was obtained under UV light irradiation, while TC could also be degraded under visible light (even 700 nm light) irradiation.

Visible light photocatalytic degradation of tetracycline over TiO2

2019 Fall National Meeting

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