Textile, aerospace and pharmaceutical industries have introduced a broad range of synthetic organic pollutants into groundwater sources, contributing to a critical global shortage of clean water. Photocatalysis represents a promising technology for water remediation. It involves the use of sunlight as a sustainable and green alternative to degrade pollutants in water. Colloidal ternary mixed-metal spinel oxide NCs of formula AB2O4 are attractive materials for photocatalytic applications due to their stability, composition-based synergistic effects, size-dependent magnetic properties, and high surface area-to-volume ratios that provide high concentrations of catalytically-active surface sites. The spinel metal ferrites are visible-light absorbing ternary metal oxide materials, promising for photocatalysis due to the ability of the spinel crystal structure, (M1-xFex)TET[MxFe2-x]OCTO4 (Fig. 1), to accommodate various combinations of metal cations in tunable distributions across tetrahedral and octahedral crystal sites. This broader range of cation distribution, together with the chemical identity of the M metal, contribute to the fine-tuning of the material’s optical band gap, directly impacting its band dispersion and band-edge positions, thus, its photocatalytic properties. This talk presents the use spinel ferrites of formula MFe2O4 (M= Fe, Co, Ni, Cu, Zn) as a model system to (i) Understand the role of ligands and solvent chemistry to develop synthetic strategies for controlling simultaneously the size, shape, composition and cation distribution of spinel oxide nanocrystals and (ii) Uncover the effects of these parameters, along with surface chemistry, on the photocatalytic activity of spinel ferrites nanocrystals to catalyze the oxidative degradation of pollutants in water, such as phenol, nitrophenol, BPA and other phenol-based pollutants. The role of catalyst load, ligh source and radical and charge-carrier scavengers, will be discussed in depth.

From molecules to spinel ferrite colloidal nanocrystals: A photocatalytic oxidative degradation study of phenolic pollutants in water

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ACS Fall 2022

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