Abstract
Particulate matter is one of the most persistent global air pollutants that is causing health problems, climate disturbance and building deterioration. A sustainable technique that is able to degrade soot using (sun)light is photocatalysis. Currently, research on photocatalytic soot oxidation focusses on large band gap TiO2-based photocatalysts and thus requires the use of UV light. It would prove useful if visible light, and thus a larger fraction of the (freely available) solar spectrum, could additionally be utilised to drive this process. In this work, a visible light-active photocatalyst, WO3, is benchmarked to TiO2 under both UV and visible light. At the same time, the versatility and drastic improvement of a recently introduced digital image-based soot degradation detection method are demonstrated. An additional step correcting for non-soot related catalyst colour changes is applied, resulting in accurate detection and quantification of soot degradation for all studied photocatalysts, even for materials such as WO3 that are inherently coloured. With this study, we aim to broaden the scope of photocatalytic soot oxidation technology to visible light-active photocatalyst. Along with this study, we provide a versatile soot degradation detection methodology based on digital image analysis that is made widely applicable.
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The datasets used and/or analysed during the current study are available from the corresponding author on reasonable request.
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Acknowledgements
Myrthe Van Hal acknowledges the Research Foundation–Flanders (FWO) for a doctoral fellowship (1135619N).
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MVH: conceptualisation, methodology, data acquisition, formal analysis, writing—original draft. SL: supervision, funding acquisition. SWV: supervision, funding acquisition, conceptualisation, writing—review and editing.
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Van Hal, M., Lenaerts, S. & Verbruggen, S.W. Photocatalytic soot degradation under UV and visible light. Environ Sci Pollut Res 30, 22262–22272 (2023). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11356-022-23804-0
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11356-022-23804-0