Photocatalytic nanocomposites for increased optical activity

Ankara : The Department of Physics and the Institute of Engineering and Sciences of Bilkent University, 2008. ; Thesis (Master's) -- Bilkent University, 2008. ; Includes bibliographical references leaves 63-70. ; To combat environmental pollution, photocatalytic decomposition provides degradation of organic and inorganic contaminants near the surface of the photocatalyst nanoparticles by converting optical energy of the absorbed light into chemical energy for the redox reactions. However, photocatalytic activities of such semiconductor metal-oxide nanoparticles are limited with their bandgap energy that allows for optical absorption typically in the ultraviolet spectral range. Yet another limitation is that the photocatalytic activity of these semiconductor nanoparticles is substantially reduced when they are immobilized in solid thin films, resulting from their effectively decreased active surface area. But such immobilized nanoparticles are much more desired in industrial applications, e.g., for mass environmental decontamination and outdoors/indoors self-cleaning on large surfaces. To address these issues, in this thesis, we investigated and demonstrated the spectral behavior and time evolution of optical activity curves of immobilized TiO2 and ZnO nanoparticles. We studied the nanoparticle size effect for the optical activity and demonstrated significant increase in the resulting photocatalysis with decreasing the size of such immobilized nanoparticles for the first time. We obtained optimal excitation conditions for TiO2 and ZnO nanocomposite films separately. We achieved maximum optical recovery levels of 93% for TiO2 nanoparticles and 55% for ZnO nanoparticles at the excitation wavelengths of 310 nm and 290 nm, respectively, after optical irradiation with an excitation density of 7.3 J/cm2 , where we observed no optical recovery for their respective negative control groups (with no nanoparticles). In these comparative spectral studies, we showed strong correlation between the differential optical recovery ...