Photocatalytic Study of New Immobilized TiO2 Technique Towards Degradation of Reactive Red 4 Dye

Abstract

The study on TiO2 for wastewater remediation has gained interest among researchers. However, the application of this photocatalyst is limited due to non-recyclability of conventional TiO2. Thus, immobilization technique has been developed to solve this issue. Hence, a comparison study between two types of immobilized photocatalysts namely titanium dioxide (TiO2) and TiO2 mixed with polyvinyl alcohol (PVA) has been conducted in this work to observe the significant effect of PVA polymer in photocatalysis reaction of reactive red 4 (RR4) dye. Double sided adhesive tape (DSAT) was used as thin layer binder in this immobilization system. The result shows that the photocatalytic performance of TiO2-PVA/DSAT was higher than that of TiO2/DSAT under both normal UV and visible light irradiations due to the conjugated unsaturated polymer from PVA serve as electron donor for TiO2 thus increase the photocatalysis process. Besides, TiO2-PVA/DSAT was also found to possess much better adhesion strength to the support material compared to TiO2/DSAT. Based on the findings, this TiO2 immobilization system is expected to be beneficial in the industrial wastewater treatment. Thus, further study to improve the photocatalytic activity of this immobilized TiO2 will be in our future work.