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Hybridising nitrogen doped titania with kaolinite: a feasible catalyst for a semi-continuous photo-degradation reactor system

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journal contribution
posted on 2015-09-03, 10:46 authored by Tze H. Sia, Sheng Dai, Bo Jin, Mark Biggs, Meng N. Chong
The application of TiO2 catalyst for an industrial water treatment process is still limited due to its poor reusability, low oxidation efficiency and UV light use. Taking these challenges as the objective of this study, we integrated particle impregnation with nitrogen-doping methods to hybrid nitrogen doped TiO2 nanoparticles with kaolinite (NTK) as the photocatalyst for water treatment. SEM/TEM, XPS and XRD results revealed that the doped nitrogen in the NTK particle inclined toward interstitial, and the TiO2 nanocrystals were hybridised into the layered kaolinite minerals. Kaolinite was found to be an excellent TiO2 nanocatalyst supporter, providing promising adsorption transitions to not only sensitise TiO2 nanocrystals, but also enhance their photocatalytic oxidation capacity and recoverability. Kinetic studies showed that the NTK catalysts demonstrated a superior interfacial oxidation and photocatalytic degradation ability under visible light irradiation. Importantly, the NTK catalysts could be easily recovered for reuse with stable photo-degradation performance in a semi-continuous photoreactor process. The high degradation capacity, reusability and visible light accessibility of the NTK catalysts make the NTK-catalysed technology promising for industrial applications.

Funding

BioNanotechnology Laboratory: Energy, Water and Materials at the University of Adelaide, Adelaide, Australia

History

School

  • Science

Department

  • Chemistry

Published in

Chemical Engineering Journal

Volume

279

Pages

939 - 947

Citation

SIA, T.H. et al., 2015. Hybridising nitrogen doped titania with kaolinite: a feasible catalyst for a semi-continuous photo-degradation reactor system. Chemical Engineering Journal, 279, pp. 939 - 947.

Publisher

© Elsevier B.V.

Version

  • VoR (Version of Record)

Publisher statement

This work is made available according to the conditions of the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International (CC BY-NC-ND 4.0) licence. Full details of this licence are available at: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/

Publication date

2015

Notes

This paper was accepted for publication in the journal Chemical Engineering Journal and the definitive published version is available at http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.cej.2015.05.101

ISSN

1385-8947

Language

  • en