Adsorption and photodegradation of micropollutant in wastewater by photocatalyst TiO2/rice husk biochar.

With the acceleration of global industrialization, organic pollutants have become a threat to ecological safety and human health. This work prepared TiO2/rice husk biochar (TiO2/BC) for removal of bisphenol A (BA) micropollutant in wastewater. Experiment results revealed a low BA removal efficiency by TiO2/BC was observed at 34.5% under the dark environment. However, the removal rate of BA by UV light-assisted TiO2/BC significantly increased to 97.6% in 1 h. The results also demonstrated that the removal performance of BA using TiO2/BC was 2.1times higher than that of commercial TiO2 (46.4%). Besides, the removal efficiency of BA by reused TiO2/BC after eight cycles slightly decreased by 12.8%, demonstrating the excellent properties of the prepared composite. TiO2/BC also exhibited high removal efficiency of BA (over 89%) from the synthetic wastewater sample, indicating the potential utilization of composite for removing BA in wastewater. This work provides a new way to turn biomass waste into useful material and effective method to remove micropollutant BA.

Photoluminescence Properties and Photocatalytic Performance of Different Size ZnO Nanoparticles Decorated Graphene Oxide.

We synthesized the hybrid structure of the graphene oxide (GO) sheet and the size-controlled ZnO nanoparticles. The ZnO quantum sizes were confirmed from UV-vis spectrophotometry and TEM results. The ZnO quantum dot exhibited a stable broad and strong photoluminescence (PL) emission which is broader with the increase of ZnO nanoparticle size. The hybrid ZnO/GO results an abrupt decrease of PL emission and the excellent photodegradation performance of methylene blue under UV-light irradiation. A considerable increase of the photodegradation rate with decreasing ZnO nanoparticle size is due to the enhancement of ZnO surface interaction and the improvement of electron transfer at the ZnO/GO interface.