Abstracts Book - IMRC 2018

• SC4-P093
BANDGAP CONTROL IN TITANIUM OXIDE PARTICLES USING
REDUCED GRAPHENE OXIDE
Daniela Olmos 1 , Andres Fest 1 , Alexis Piñeiro Garcia 1 , Sofia Magdalena Vega Diaz 1,2 , Ferdinando
Tristán López 1
1
Instituto Tecnológico de Celaya, Departamento de Ingeniería Química, Mexico. 2 Instituto
Tecnológico de Celaya, Cátedras CONACYT-Instituto Tecnológico de Celaya, Mexico.
Titania (TiO2) is one of the most studied materials in its role as photocatalyst.
The reason for this interest lies in the relative abundance of this material, its low
cost and its great stability in the different environments in which photocatalytic
reactions occur.In addition, titania has the ability to generate electron-hole pairs
with adequate energy to favor the formation of oxidant radicals water.
One of the main disadvantages of titania as a photocatalyst is the value of
bandgap (3.2 eV), which turns out to be very large and limits titania to absorb
ultraviolet light, which represents approximately 5% of total sunlight, and as the
phenomenon of recombination electron-hollow occurs at high speeds, the
photocatalytic processes in which the titania participates usually have low
efficiency.
To overcome the limitations of titania in photocatalytic processes, the strategy
of making nanocomposites with different materials has been used, where
carbon nanostructures stand out. It has been reported that the inclusion of
these nanostructures (fullerenes, carbon nanotubes, graphene, etc.) allows
reducing the forbidden bandwidth of titania and also reducing the electron-hole
recombination process with great success.
In the present work, the synergy, between titania and reduced graphene oxide
as dopant, is sought to modify the bandgap energy as a function of different
dopant amount in the hybrid material as well as the anatase and rutile
composition in the titania matrix. In this way it is possible to propose an strategy
to increase the photocatalyst efficiency and performance in wastewater
treatment to eliminate organic compounds.
Keywords: graphene oxide, titanium oxide, photocatalysis
Presenting authors email: andres.fest@gmail.com