High-performance TiO2-based Pollutant Degradation Devices Manufactured Directly From Ti Foil Enabled By The Surface Mechanical Attrition Treatment

Description

Titanium dioxide is a photocatalytic substance widely applied in energy and environment areas, e.g., pollutant photodegradation. However, the native forms of TiO2 present considerable limitations, particularly a wide electronic bandgap and a high resistivity. Current solutions to address these limitations focus on 1) doping TiO2 with impurities, or 2) introducing surface disorder to TiO2, which generally involves high safety risks and complex manufacturing procedures. Furthermore, the commonly seen TiO2-based photocatalysts are TiO2 nanoparticles—which are expensive to fabricate, difficult to recover/collect after use, and complex to assemble into devices. We propose a safe and facile method to directly mass producing bulk photocatalytic devices based on nanostructured TiO2 of high photocatalytic efficiency. This method is based on the simple yet powerful surface mechanical attrition treatment (SMAT), which can modify TiO2 with both dopants and surface disorder simultaneously in one treatment. Centered on this novel method, TiO2 nanostructure-based devices will be enabled with greatly improved photocatalytic performance (≧50% increase) at low manufacturing cost. More importantly, in this project, we will develop novel finesse SMAT techniques, expanding the scope of SMAT from primarily bulky high-ductility metallic samples, to further covering delicate and nanostructured samples (e.g., porous ceramic nanotube arrays).