Optical and Physicochemical Properties of Silica-Supported TiO2 Photocatalysts

Abstract

Commercial applications of photocatalysis in slurry reactors employing titanium dioxide particles present the disadvantage of the additional cost associated with the downstream catalyst separation. In past years a significant effort has been made to develop supported titania photocatalysts on particles of larger size in order to facilitate the sedimentation recovery process. In this work, two different silica materials have been used for preparing immobilized catalysts. Their physicochemical characteristics have been compared with those corresponding to two commercially available unsupported titanium dioxide catalysts. However, for reaction kinetics and reactor design purposes, three additional properties must be known: (i) the spectral specific radiation absorption coefficient, (ii) the spectral specific radiation scattering coefficient, and (iii) the asymmetry factor of a model for the angular distribution of the scattered photons (the phase function). They have been determined with specially designed spectrophotometer transmission, diffuse transmittance, and diffuse reflectance experiments and constitute the most significant addition to this contribution.