Engineering hierarchical FeS/TiO nanotubes on Ti mesh as a tailorable flow-through catalyst belt for all-day-active degradation of organic pollutants and pathogens.

The increasing organic and microbiological pollutions in fresh water caused by human activities and industrial development have become a global concern nowadays. In this study, three-dimensional (3D) hierarchical FeS/TiO structures with nanotube geometries were grown on a Ti mesh (M-TNTAs-FeS). Benefitting from the abundant available reactive sites on the open 3D micro/nanoporous structures, excellent photocatalytic activity of FeS/TiO heterostructure in solar light, and satisfactory Fenton activity of FeS, the obtained M-TNTAs-FeS exhibits outstanding performance as an all-day-active catalyst. Importantly, flexible meshes can be easily tailored and enveloped into fluorinated ethylene propylene (FEP) pockets in a series as a flow-through belt for large-capacitance applications (998 L m at a flow rate of 417 L m h for a four-pockets belt), as indicated by the degradation of azo dyes, antibiotics, pesticides, and pathogens. This study may inspire a new tailorable catalyst design for a promising point-of-use purification device.