Optofluidics may hold the key to greater success of photocatalytic water treatment. This is evidenced by our findings in this paper that the planar microfluidic reactor can overcome the limitations of mass transfer and photon transfer in the previous photocatalytic reactors and improve the photoreaction efficiency by more than 100 times. The microreactor has a planar chamber (5 cm×1.8 cm×100 μm) enclosed by two TiO2-coated glass slides as the top cover and bottom substrate and a microstructured UV-cured NOA81 layer as the sealant and flow input∕output. In experiment, the microreactor achieves 30% degradation of 3 ml 3×10−5M methylene blue within 5 min and shows a reaction rate constant two orders higher than the bulk reactor. Under optimized conditions, a reaction rate of 8% s−1 is achieved under solar irradiation. The average apparent quantum efficiency is found to be only 0.25%, but the effective apparent quantum efficiency reaches as high as 25%. Optofluidic reactors inherit the merits of microfluidics, such as large surface∕volume ratio, easy flow control, and rapid fabrication and offer a promising prospect for large-volume photocatalytic water treatment.
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机译：光流体学可能是光催化水处理取得更大成功的关键。我们在本文中的发现证明了这一点，平面微流体反应器可以克服以前的光催化反应器中传质和光子传递的限制，并将光反应效率提高100倍以上。微反应器具有一个平面腔室（5 cm×1.8 cm×100μm），该腔室由两个以TiO2涂层的载玻片作为上盖和下基板，并具有一个微结构化的UV固化NOA81层作为密封剂和流量输入/输出。在实验中，微反应器在5分钟内实现了3 ml 3×10 -5 M亚甲蓝的30％降解，并且反应速率常数比本体反应器高两个数量级。在最佳条件下，太阳辐射下的反应速率为8％s -1 。发现平均表观量子效率仅为0.25％，但是有效表观量子效率高达25％。光电流体反应器继承了微流体的优点，例如大的表面容积比，易于控制的流量和快速的制造，并为大容量光催化水处理提供了广阔的前景。
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