This thesis is concerned with the development of plastic, photocatalytic reactors/film, for water and air purification and sterilization.
Chapters 1 and
2 provide an introduction to the subject area and a brief description of the main common experimental methods employed.
Chapter 3 describes two types of lab-scale, 3D printed plastic, fixed-film, flow-through photocatalytic, both of which are sinusoidal in shape, and only differ in that one has no baffles, reactor
A, whereas the other has, reactor
B. Both reactors are lined with a P25 TiO
2/polylactic acid (PLA) coating, which, after UVA pre-conditioning, is used to photocatalyse the bleaching of circulating aqueous solutions of either methylene blue, MB, or phenol, PhOH, repeatably, without any obvious loss of activity. The rate of the photocatalysed bleaching of MB exhibited by reactor
B shows a much lower dependence upon flow rate than reactor
A, due to the greater lateral mixing of the laminar flow streams produced by the baffles. In
Chapter 4, another reactor, with a similar design to that of reactor
A,
3D APPR, is described and used to purify air containing the test pollutants, NO
2, NO, acetaldehyde and ozone. In all cases, the 3D APPR is more effective at removing NO
x than a reference photocatalyst, Activ
TM self-cleaning glass. Finally, in
Chapter 5, the production of several different thin, disposable, antibacterial, photocatalytic plastic films is described, in which the semiconductor photocatalyst, SC, powder (TiO
2, ZnO and WO
3) is embedded in low-density polyethylene, LDPE, by heat pressing. The resulting SC/LDPE film is then tested photocatalysed antibacterial activity, via its inactivation of Escherichia coli,
E. coli and the results show that rough films are better at deactivating
E. coli, both under illumination and in the dark. Finally, possible areas of future work are briefly discussed in
Chapter 6.