Vale, M.; Barrocas, B.T.; Serôdio, R.M.N.; Oliveira, M.C.; Lopes, J.M.; Marques, A.C. Robust Photocatalytic MICROSCAFS® with Interconnected Macropores for Sustainable Solar-Driven Water Purification. Int. J. Mol. Sci.2024, 25, 5958.
Vale, M.; Barrocas, B.T.; Serôdio, R.M.N.; Oliveira, M.C.; Lopes, J.M.; Marques, A.C. Robust Photocatalytic MICROSCAFS® with Interconnected Macropores for Sustainable Solar-Driven Water Purification. Int. J. Mol. Sci. 2024, 25, 5958.
Vale, M.; Barrocas, B.T.; Serôdio, R.M.N.; Oliveira, M.C.; Lopes, J.M.; Marques, A.C. Robust Photocatalytic MICROSCAFS® with Interconnected Macropores for Sustainable Solar-Driven Water Purification. Int. J. Mol. Sci.2024, 25, 5958.
Vale, M.; Barrocas, B.T.; Serôdio, R.M.N.; Oliveira, M.C.; Lopes, J.M.; Marques, A.C. Robust Photocatalytic MICROSCAFS® with Interconnected Macropores for Sustainable Solar-Driven Water Purification. Int. J. Mol. Sci. 2024, 25, 5958.
Abstract
Advanced oxidation processes, including photocatalysis, have been proven effective at organic dye degradation. Tailored porous materials with regulated pore size, shape and morphology offer a sustainable solution to the water pollution problem, by acting as support materials to grafted photocatalytic nanoparticles (NPs). This research investigates the influence of pore and particle sizes of photocatalytic MICROSCAFS®, on the degradation of methyl orange (MO) in aqueous solution (10 mg/L). Photocatalytic MICROSCAFS® are made of binder-less supported P25 TiO2 NPs within MICROSCAFS®, which are silica-titania microspheres with controlled size and intercon-nected macroporosity, synthesized by an adapted sol-gel method that involves a polymeriza-tion-induced phase separation process. Photocatalytic experiments were done both in batch and flow reactors, these latter ones targeting real-life conditions. Photocatalytic degradation of 87% in 2 hours (batch) and 29% in 5 hours (flow), was achieved, using a calibrated solar light simulator (1 sun) and a photocatalyst/pollutant mass ratio of 23. This study introduces a novel flow kinetic model which provides the modeling and simulation of the photocatalytic MICROSCAFS® per-formance. A scavenger study was performed enabling in-depth mechanistic understanding. Fi-nally, the transformation products resulting from the MO photocatalytic degradation were elu-cidated by high-resolution mass spectrometry experiments and subjected to in-silico toxicity as-sessment.
Chemistry and Materials Science, Materials Science and Technology
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