Solar Photocatalytic Degradation of Diuron in Aqueous Solution by TiO2

Abstract

The solar photocatalytic degradation of diuron, which is one of the herbicides, has been studied by a solar pilot plant in heterogeneous solar photocatalysis with titanium dioxide. The pilot plant was made up of compound parabolic collectors specially designed for solar photocatalytic applications. The influence of different variables such as, H2O2 initial concentration, TiO2 initial concentration, and diuron initial concentration with their relationship to the degradation efficiency were studied. Hydrogen peroxide (H2O2) found to increase the rate of diuron degradation. The best removal efficiency of heterogeneous solar photocatalytic TiO2 system was found to be 46.65 % and for heterogeneous solar photocatalytic TiO2/ H2O2 system was found to be 80.65 %. Based on these results, the solar photocatalytic degradation by TiO2/ H2O2 system could be a useful technology for the treatment of effluents containing diuron.

Synthesis and characterization of TiO2-based supported materials for industrial application and recovery in a pilot photocatalytic plant using chemometric approach

“…A multivariate chemometric approach was successfully applied to the case study of a scalable and home-made heterogeneous photocatalytic plant based on a CPC design, which is reported to be one the best design choices among others for big water treatment facilities (Grčić et al 2024 ; Mustafa et al 2023 ; Rapti et al 2023 ). Particularly, the application of the D-Optimal design helped to dramatically reduce the number of experiments while simultaneously evaluating the significance of each variable as well as exploring the possible interaction between them, which would not be possible with a mono-variate approach.…”

“…Surface area was recorded to be very high for the samples treated with hydrothermal process and with a higher isopropanol volume during sol–gel synthesis (S1 and S2). To the best of our knowledge, we can state that no composite materials relying on the coupling between a semiconductor and a luminescent material was ever studied in a photocatalytic plant, as recent reports only discuss about commercial TiO 2 or general semiconductors fixed on solid supports (Chaubey et al 2023 ; Grčić et al 2024 ; Mustafa et al 2023 ). Moreover, the sol–gel synthesis could be the right choice to maintain good levels of reproducibility, control over the purity, and morphology while scaling up towards a large-scale production.…”