An Innovative and Easy Method for Iron-Doped Titania Synthesis

In this work, photocatalytically active titanium oxide nanoparticles were synthesized for the treatment of contaminated water under visible light. Various Ag, Sr and Fe-based synthesis and doping techniques (mainly hydrothermal and sol-gel methods) were performed. Adsorptive and photocatalytic properties were studied by testing in batch mode for the decontaminating a synthetic methylene blue solution (used as a model contaminant) using a simple 13 W LED bulb as the light source. The best material in terms of both activity (high removal kinetics) and simplicity of synthesis was found to be titanium oxide doped with Fe via "solid-state"method. This method enabled the synthesis of titania nanoparticles about 70 nanometers in size with Fe3+ effectively substituting titanium atoms (Ti4+) in the crystalline bulk of titania. The pseudo-first-order kinetic model was found to represent the behavior of the experimental data.