2024-03-29T08:33:47Zhttp://digital.csic.es/dspace-oai/requestoai:digital.csic.es:10261/1693812018-09-05T00:55:11Zcom_10261_84com_10261_5col_10261_841
00925njm 22002777a 4500
dc
Jiménez Carmona, Rocío
author
2016-12
In recent years, emerging pollutants have appeared as one of the main causes of global pollution
of water resources, due to their persistence in aqueous media and their resistance to be
eliminated by conventional water treatment methods. This has led to the development of more
clean and efficient technologies for wastewater treatment based on the production and use of
highly oxidizing species (Advanced Oxidation Processes), which are able to interact and degrade
almost any pollutant at ambient conditions. In this work, heterogeneous photocatalysis
has been investigated as advanced process for the degradation of rhodamine B, a hazardous
organic compound used as a colorant and commonly present in industrial wastewaters.
The major drawback of heterogeneous photocatalysis is that, up to now, the workability of high
performance photocatalysts (mostly semiconductors) is limited to their use under ultraviolet
light; this leads to high operational costs that hinder the implementation of this technique at
large scales. Therefore, it would be desirable to increase the absorption features of those semiconductors
in the visible spectrum, so as to increase the photocatalytic efficiency of these systems
under sunlight. An approach to attain this goal is the use of carbon materials as additives
to tungsten semiconductors (which present higher activity under sunlight than TiO2 benchmark).
In order to explore this possibility in depth, the synthesis, characterization and evaluation of
the photocatalytic performance of Bi2WO6/C and WO3/C photocatalysts were carried out in this
thesis. Moreover, and aiming at elucidating the role of the additive, carbon materials with varied
structural, textural and physico-chemical properties were investigated.
The results obtained showed that both the synthesis route and the amount of carbon additive
are key factors in the photocatalytic performance exhibited by the binary semiconductor/carbon
photocatalyst, and should be optimized for each semiconductor. Furthermore, the nature of the
carbon material used as additive strongly influences the optical, textural and surface features
of the resulting semiconductor/carbon photocatalysts, and thus determines the global efficiency
of the photodegradation process. In this regard, it was also observed that the prevailing photooxidation
mechanism of rhodamine B depends on the surface chemistry of the photocatalyst.
Thus, acidic carbon additives favour degradation of the studied dye via coupled photosensitization
and photocatalytic mechanisms. Contrarily, in carbon materials of basic nature, and due to the weak interactions between the pollutant and the surface of photocatalysts, the degradation
occurred predominantly via the photocatalytic process. On the other hand, the self photoactivity
exhibited by the carbon materials used as additives also contributed to the enhancement of the
photoconversion of rhodamine B, due to their ability to generate O-radical species under illumination
in aqueous suspensions. A thorough study and control of the above mentioned variables
has pointed out that the use of carbon materials as additives to tungsten-based photocatalysts
offers new possibilities in the water treatment processes, due to the enhanced performance of
such hybrid catalysts towards the degradation of rhodamine B under solar radiation.
http://hdl.handle.net/10261/169381
Materiales de carbono como aditivos de fotocatalizadores de wolframio para la oxidación de contaminantes bajo luz solar