Abstract
Floating photocatalyst is of extensive interest due to easy recovery and efficient light harvest. Support materials largely determine the stability of floating photocatalysts and their synthesis complexity. Thus, finding proper floating supports is very important. Herein, ethylene–vinyl acetate copolymer (EVA) was investigated as a support to prepare floating TiO2/EVA using a simple thermal crosslinking procedure. Multiple characterization analyses demonstrated that TiO2 was anchored onto EVA surface evenly via hydrogen-bond-enhanced physical crosslinking and remained its virgin crystal structure. Photocatalytic experiments showed that the removal efficiency of Rhodamine B (RhB) by floating TiO2/EVA increased by 33.8% as compared to suspended particle TiO2. The h+ and ·O2− played dominant roles in TiO2/EVA-driven RhB degradation. A 30-day stability test demonstrated that TiO2/EVA had a high thermal, pH, and photo- stability. The three-run reuse test proved that TiO2/EVA exhibited satisfactory reusability. This study provides a new option for floating photocatalyst synthesis.
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The datasets used and/or analyzed during the current study are available from the corresponding author on reasonable request.
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Acknowledgements
We are grateful to the National Key R&D Program of China (2019YFC0408502), the National Natural Science Foundation of China (51578205, U19A20108, 51728801), the Fundamental Research Funds for the Central Universities (JZ2021HGQB0283), and the Research Fund Program of Guangdong Provincial Key Laboratory of Environmental Pollution Control and Remediation Technology (2020B1212060022) for supporting this work.
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QW: investigation, methodology, data curation, writing – original draft. JZM: conceptualization, investigation, writing – original draft. HY: data curation, formal analysis. RT: conceptualization, validation, writing – review and editing, funding acquisition. SJY: validation, visualization. YLW: writing – review and editing. WW: validation, resources. HPL: writing – review and editing. ZHH: conceptualization, writing – review and editing, supervision, funding acquisition. All the authors agree that the description of the individual contributions presented above is accurate and appropriate.
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Wu, Q., Meng, J., Yao, H. et al. Thermal crosslinking synthesis of ethylene–vinyl acetate copolymer supported floating TiO2 photocatalyst: characterization and photocatalytic performance. Environ Sci Pollut Res 29, 50208–50217 (2022). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11356-022-19446-x
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11356-022-19446-x