A new porous structure with dispersed nano-TiO2 in a three-dimensional carbon skeleton for achieving high photocatalytic activity

摘要

A new photocatalyst is proposed that incorporates TiO2 nanopowder into a three-dimensional carbon skeleton to create a TiO2/C porous microsphere with adjustable pore size, and its photocatalytic activity is investigated and compared to that of a commercially available photocatalytic powder (P25). The photocatalytic efficiency of the proposed TiO2/C porous microsphere achieves a considerable improvement of more than 2-3 times that of P25 when irradiated by UV and visible lights. With the further incorporation of Fe, the TiO2/C/Fe porous microsphere exhibits maximum photodegradation efficiencies of 97% and 45% when low-power UV and visible lights are the energy sources, respectively; these are significantly higher than the 40% and 10% measured for P25. In addition, the major mechanism for this improvement in photocatalytic activity by the porous microsphere is identified by calculating band gap energies based on a modified Kubelka-Munk function.