EuropaCat 2023

Dr. Olivier Monfort and his PhD students, Sridhar Gowrisankaran and Arshitha Madhusudan, attended the 15th European Congress on Catalysis (EuropaCat 2023) in Prague, Czechia where oral and poster communications have be given by our research group. You can find below the abstract of the talk given by Dr. Monfort on "Simultaneous coupling of photocatalysis and Fenton-based-processes: An efficient strategy for water treatment?".

Photocatalysis and Fenton-based processes are well known advanced oxidation processes (AOPs), especially for the degradation of organic pollutants in water. Titania (TiO2) is one of the most popular photocatalyst which is interesting in the form of nanomaterials due their unique properties, like the high charge carriers transport in highly-ordered self-organized TiO2 nanotube layers. Fenton reagents including iron species and hydrogen peroxide are promising since they are low-cost along with high availability. However, both these AOPs exhibit drawbacks (electron-hole pairs recombination, iron sludge production, etc.), that can be potentially limited by coupling TiO2 and Fe within a single material. Therefore, this conference presentation aims first, to characterize the physico-chemical properties of synthezied Fe surface-modified TiO2 nanotube layers (Fe-TiO2) and then, to assess the contribution of each identified AOP triggered by Fe-TiO2. To this end, their simultaneous coupling is discussed by investigating the performance of Fe-TiO2 for the degradation of caffeine, a top pharmaceutical contaminant, in water.

Acknowledgments

This work has been co-financed by the Slovak Research and Development Agency under the contracts No. APVV-21-0039 and the Scientific Grant Agency of the Slovak Ministry of Education, Science and Sport (VEGA project No. 1/0319/23). This work has been also financially supported by the French government through the Partenariat Hubert Curien (Programmme Stefanik 2023) and the Slovak Research and Development Agency under the contract No. SK-FR-22-0002.