Titania-Silica Materials for Enhanced Photocatalysis

Recent advanced development of metal-loaded mesoporous organosilicas as catalytic nanoreactors

Ordered periodic mesoporous organosilicas have been widely applied in adsorption/separation/sensor technologies and the fields of biomedicine/biotechnology as well as catalysis. Crucially, surface modification with functional groups and metal complexes or nanoparticle loading has ensured high efficacy and efficiency. This review will highlight the current state of design and catalytic application of transition metal-loaded mesoporous organosilica nanoreactors. It will outline prominent synthesis approaches for the grafting of metal complexes, metal salt adsorption and in situ preparation of metal nanoparticles, and summarize the catalytic performance of the resulting mesoporous organosilica hybrid materials. Finally, the potential prospects and challenges of metal-loaded mesoporous organosilica nanoreactors are addressed.

Synthesis of TiO2/Nanozeolite Composites for Highly Efficient Photocatalytic Oxidation of Propene in the Gas Phase

In this work, we reported the preparation of composites based on titania (TiO2) and Zeolite Socony Mobil-5 (ZSM-5) nanozeolite, following two approaches (i.e., incorporating the presynthesized zeolite in the synthesis medium of TiO2 and incorporating presynthesized TiO2 in the synthesis medium of ZSM-5). The materials synthesized were characterized by X-ray fluorescence (XRF), X-ray diffraction (XRD), nitrogen adsorption, X-ray photoelectron spectroscopy (XPS), ultraviolet-visible spectroscopy (UV-vis), transmission electron microscopy (TEM), scanning electron microscopy (SEM), and energy-dispersive X-ray (EDX) spectrometry analysis, and their photocatalytic activities were assessed in the oxidation of propene in the gas phase. It was observed that the synthesis methodology affects the final properties of the composite, which ultimately affected their photocatalytic performance in the studied application. It was found that the Nano-ZSM5/TiO2 composite was the most active among the investigated samples, which was attributed to the intimate contact between the two components of the composite, the preserved properties of the photocatalytic active phase in the final material, and the positive contribution of the nanozeolite by increasing the local concentration of propene.