Effectiveness of photocatalysis of MMT-supported TiO and TiO nanotubes for rhodamine B degradation.

The aim of this paper is to synthesize montmorillonite/TiO-nanoparticles (MMT/TiO and montmorillonite/TiO-nanotubes (MMT/TiO) photocatalysts through a simple wet agitation method based on TiO nanoparticles and MMT. They are likely to accumulate the effect of adsorption and photodegradation. Then, the photocatalysts are applied to degrade the rhodamine B in dye effluents. The structural characterizations of photocatalysts are investigated using transmission electron microscopy (TEM), scanning electron microscopy (SEM), X-ray diffraction (XRD), Fourier transform infrared spectroscopy (FTIR) and energy-dispersive X-ray spectroscopy (EDX). The photocatalytic activities and effectiveness of photocatalysts are evaluated through rhodamine B degradation at different concentrations under dark and UV-C irradiation conditions. The results show that the synthesized TiO have an average tube diameter of 5 nm and a tube length at least about 110 nm, which are intercalated into MMT sheets in MMT/TiO photocatalyst. Meanwhile, TiO nanoparticles are immobilized on the surface of MMT sheets in the MMT/TiO photocatalyst. The photocatalytic effectiveness of rhodamine B degradation of TiO shows a significantly enhance compared to that of TiO nanoparticles. However, photocatalytic performance of MMT/TiO is lower than that of MMT/TiO. The degradation effectiveness of MMT/TiO photocatalyst reaches to 100% for 3 ppm and 90% at 10 ppm of rhodamine B, while these values are 97.5% and 85.5%, respectively, recorded for MMT/TiO.