InTiSelfClean

As well known, TiO2 has been widely used in many promising applications, ranging from photovoltaics, photocatalysis and self-cleaning techniques to sensors and photo-/electrochromics. Since most organic pollutants can be completely decomposed into carbon dioxide and water when semiconducting metal oxide nanoparticles are used as a photocatalyst, TiO2 is a convenient solution for waste air and water cleaning. However, the use of this material has some limitations. Due to its large band gap (3.2 eV), TiO2 can only use less than 5% of the available solar energy. Moreover, the high electron-hole recombination rate also makes it a relatively inefficient photocatalyst. The project proposes the innovative design of sustainable metal oxide nanoarchitectures by doping, co-doping and heterostructuring titania based materials. The major challenge is to improve the photocatalytic activity of the semiconducting titanium oxide photocatalysts and obtain a visible domain photoresponse. This could be achieved by C or N doping, by C-N co-doping or by heterostructuring using conjugated polymers and ferrites.  The new designed materials will ensure increased specific surface areas, lower band-gap energies, but would also be selective for specific contaminant molecules (from polluted air or water), promoting this way a photo-response in visible domain and maximizing the photocatalytic process. The composite materials will present the advantage of ensuring charge transport and avoiding photoinduced charge carrier recombination. Another challenge of this proposal is to obtain titania thin coatings using two different methods (dip-coating and spin-coating) and compare them from the photocatalytic point of view and test their self-cleaning properties. Hence, the present project proposes the preparation and characterization of innovative feasible self-cleaning films (coatings) with enhanced photocatalytic degradation of toxic compounds from wastewater, as well as from indoor air.