Since water is an essential substance for all life on earth, it is therefore vital to prevent its pollution and to improve wastewater purification processes. There is a vast number of pollutants which can contaminate water, of which bisphenol A (known as an endocrine disruptor) is the pollutant studied herein. In this study, several TiO2/GO based nanocomposites with various GO loadings (2, 4, 10, 20 and 40%) and differently shaped nanocrystalline TiO2 phases (titanate nanotubes (TNTs) and calcined titanate nanotubes (TNTs_500)) were synthesised. All of the nanocomposites were characterised through SEM, UV-vis-DR, TGA, BET, FT-IR and CHNS analyses and were used in the heterogeneous photocatalytic degradation of bisphenol A and compared to the activity of pure TNTs and TNT_500 photocatalysts. All TiO2/GO nanocomposites exhibit much better activity than pure TNTs and TNTs_500 catalysts. The conversion of the BPA was analysed using HPLC and the mineralisation was analysed using a TOC analysis. The best experiment was performed with TNTs_500 + 10% GO composite, which can be attributed to the TiO2 crystalline structure obtained. According to the results obtained, TiO2 + 10% GO was found to exhibit the best degradation ratio, which can be ascribed to the fact that excessive GO can act as a charge carrier recombination centre and promotes the recombination of electron-hole pairs in reduced GO.
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