(637a) Gas-Phase Visible Light Photocatalytic Activity of Flame Aerosol Synthesized Nanostructured Transition Metal Modified TiO2

In the recent year there is an increasing interest in developing visible light photocatalytic degradation of volatile organic compounds. In our present studies, a series of transition metal (Cr, V, Fe, Cu, Mn, Co, Ni, Mo, and La) incorporated TiO₂ materials have been synthesized by using a flame aerosol synthesis technique. The resulting materials were explored for the destruction of VOCs in the presence of visible as well as UV light. A combination of various physico-chemical characterizations such as N₂ physisorption, O₂ chemisorption, X-ray diffraction (XRD), diffuse reflectance UV-vis (DR UV-vis), and temperature program reduction (TPR) were used to characterize the chemical environment of these transition metals in as-prepared catalysts. The dispersion of transition metals as determined by O₂ chemisorption suggests that they are well dispersed on TiO₂. The UV-vis spectroscopy results of M-TiO₂ materials (where M= Cr, V, Fe, Cu, Mn, Co, Ni, Mo, and La) showed enhancement of light absorption in the visible range by selected composite materials in the UV range (250-400 nm) due to the presence of titania. Among all of the catalysts, the transition metals (M=Cr and Fe) incorporated materials have shown a very promising catalytic performances in visible light.  Their catalytic performances are correlated with the UV-vis spectrum of each synthesized catalyst to reveal the specific role played by each metal ion. The photocatalytic performance of these flame aerosol synthesized transition metal incorporated TiO₂ material will be presented in this paper.