Photocatalytic oxidation of hexanol over titanium dioxide supported on mesoporous silica

Abstract

In order to improve the efficiency of TiO2, material with large surface area such as mesoporous silica is usually used as a support. In this study, the TiO2 was dispersed on mesoporous silica, MCM-41 by an impregnation method, meanwhile the bulk TiO2 was prepared by sol gel method. The X-ray diffraction (XRD) patterns showed that the intensities of diffraction peaks for MCM-41 decreased with the increase of the TiO2 loading, suggesting that the higher loading amount of TiO2 might lead to less ordered structure of MCM-41. The successful addition of TiO2 on MCM-41 was also confirmed from the fluorescence spectra, which the emission intensities of TiO2 and MCM-41 increased and decreased, respectively, with the increase of TiO2 loading on the MCM-41. The activities were compared between the bulk and dispersed TiO2 for photocatalytic oxidation of hexanol. Both bulk and dispersed TiO2 on MCM-41 showed good photocatalytic activity, while the MCM-41 did not show photocatalytic activity. Since the efficiency of photocatalyst can be defined by its respective turnover number (TON), the comparison between bulk and dispersed TiO2 on MCM-41 was made based on their TON values. It was revealed that the dispersed TiO2 on the MCM-41 with 5 wt% of TiO2 loading was the most efficient photocatalyst among all the samples.