Bleached Wood Supports for Floatable, Recyclable, and Efficient Three Dimensional Photocatalyst

Abstract

To suppress the agglomeration of a photocatalyst, facilitate its recovery, and avoid photolysis of dyes, various support materials such as ceramic, carbon, and polymer have been investigated. However, these support materials pose the following additional challenges: ceramic supports will settle down at the bottom of their container due to their high density, while the carbon support will absorb the UV-vis light for its black color. Herein, we propose a floatable, UV transmitting, mesoporous bleached wood with most lignin removal to support P25 nanoparticles (BP-wood) that can effectively, recyclable, three dimensional (3D) photocatalytic degrade dyes such as methylene blue (MB) under ambient sunlight. The BP-wood has the following advantages: (1) The delignification makes the BP-wood more porous to not only quickly transport MB solutions upstream to the top surface, but is also decorated with P25 nanoparticles on the cell wall to form a 3D photocatalyst. (2) The delignification endows the BP-wood with good UV transmittance to undergo 3D photocatalytic degradation under sunlight. (3) It can float on the surface of the MB solution to capture more sunlight to enhance the photodegradation efficiency by suppressing the photolysis of MB. (4) It has comparable or even better photocatalytic degradation of 40 mg/L and 60 mg/L MB than that of P25 nanoparticles suspension. (5) It is green, recyclable, and scalable.

Delignified Wood from Understanding the Hierarchically Aligned Cellulosic Structures to Creating Novel Functional Materials: A Review

“…Compared to DW, the prepared DW/CNT composite was floatable with a 20% higher steam generation capacity and had better solar energy utilization due to an increased thermal efficiency of 8%. In another study, [17] He et al prepared a floatable 3D DW infiltrated with a titanium dioxide (TiO 2 )-based photocatalyst for methylene blue photocatalytic degradation. The Figure 19.…”

“…DW is chemically hydrophilic due to the presence and exposure of hydroxyl groups and possible sites for DW functionalization. DW scaffolds have been functionalized for various applications such as transparent wood, [ 13,14 ] high performance thermal insulators, [ 15 ] energy generation systems, [ 16 ] nanostructured wood membranes, [ 17,18 ] carbonized wood nanocomposites, [ 19 ] and other bioinspired woods. [ 20 ]…”

Fe–Doped TiO2–Carbonized Medium–Density Fiberboard for Photodegradation of Methylene Blue under Visible Light

“…These composites remove pollutants through the combined action of adsorption and photodegradation. Several TiO 2 wood and wood-based composites [6,18,19] removed VOCs while [14,15,[20][21][22] removed organic dyes. Adding to this list are the metal-doped TiO 2 wood and wood-based composites [13,23,24] which removed VOCs while [25,26] removed organic dyes.…”

Delignified wood-based highly efficient solar steam generation device via promoting both water transportation and evaporation

“…It can be clearly identified that the solution after evaporation exhibits yellow color due to the leaching of natural wood. However, it is clean and pollution-free for DL-wood, and benign to the environment (He et al 2019).…”