Titanium dioxide photocatalysts for environmental applications: metal-doping with cerium ions for visible light activation and efficiency improvement

MARTIN, MARCELA V.; ALFANO, ORLANDO M.; SATUF, MARÍA L.

Industrial Applications of Nanoparticles: A Prospective Overview

CRC Press

Año: 2023; p. 227 - 227

TiO2-based photocatalysis has shown great potential as a low-cost and environmentally friendly technology for water purification. Nevertheless, there are technical limitations that hinder its application at industrial scale: the inefficient exploitation of the visible spectrum of the sun, the low adsorption capacity of hydrophobic pollutants, and the requirement of a post-process step to recover the TiO2 catalyst.A substantial amount of research has been conducted towards the enhancement of TiO2 photocatalysis by metal, nonmetal, and ion doping of the semiconductor. The primary purposes of TiO2 doping are to retard the fast electron-hole pair recombination and to enable visible light absorption by creating defect states in the bandgap of the semiconductor. Also, coating TiO2 with dyes has proven to produce good photocatalysts able to extend the absorption to the visible This chapter summarizes and discusses the last developed strategies for improving the degradation of organic contaminants using metal-doped catalysts, with major emphasis on cerium-doped TiO2 materials.