Preparation, characterization and performances of photocatalytic TiO2-Ag2O/PESf membrane for methylene blue removal

Abstract

This study proposed an effective method of methylene blue (MB) removal using a membrane with photocatalytic properties. The photocatalytic membrane, made of polyethersulfone (PESf) was incorporated with titanium dioxide (TiO2) and silver oxide (Ag2O) as the photocatalyst during the phase inversion process. TiO2 was synthesized using sol-gel method before being modified by Ag2O via wet pre-deposition method. The PESf/TiO2/Ag2O (PTA) membrane was characterized using scanning electron microscope coupled with elementary dispersion X-ray (SEM-EDX), X-ray diffraction analysis (XRD), attenuated Fourier transform infrared (ATR-FTIR), and ultraviolet visible near infrared (UV-vis NIR). The PTA membrane with 0.2 wt.% loading of TiO2/Ag2O shows uniform distribution of the photocatalyst materials and exhibits the highest degradation of MB at 85%. The TiO2/Ag2O presence was confirmed by the crystallinity analysis using XRD. UV-Vis NIR revealed that the band gap of TiO2 reduced from 3.2 to 2.1 eV when modified with Ag2O. This proved that membrane separation assisted with photocatalytic degradation is able to perform high degradation of MB dyes and has potential to be applied in industrial application.