4th International Congress on Environmental Researches and Technology - ICERAT'18, Athens, Greece, 14 - 18 November 2018, pp.19
The water is a scarce resource that should be clarified and recycled. The photocatalysis may help clarification of organic pollutants, which are hard to clean out with conventional methods. Titania (TiO2 – titanium dioxide) has the photocatalytical property enabling oxidation of organics in the water when it is excited by a light source. There is considerable research activity on increasing the photocatalytical activity of titania and lowering the energy band gap for excitation. The utilization of some elements (i.e. metals, ametals), compounds (e.g. other oxides) and/or molecules (e.g. dyes) has been investigated and some enhancements have been reported. The size of the titania is reported to have effect on its photocatalytical activity, that the efficiency was reported to increase with decreasing in the size of titania. In this research work, titania was synthesized via sol-gel method as nano particulates on carbonaceous organic wastes. The organic waste was ground shells of nuts (e.g. walnut). These organic wastes were rich in elements (e.g. C, N) used as dopants to increase the photocatalytical activity in previous works. Water clarification of the composite structured material was investigated by monitoring the organic dye (e.g. methylene blue) clarification under light excitation in time in the presence of the synthesized photocatalytical material.