Junwang Tang
University College London
UK
Title: Catalytic water purification driven by solar energy：Fundamental understanding and Novel materials
Biography
Biography: Junwang Tang
Abstract
Catalytic decontamination of water by solar energy has attracted substantial interest over the past decades. However to develop an efficient photocatalyst for such environmental purification, in particular water treatment still remains a big challenge, involving Material Science, Chemistry, Engineering and Physics. In particular there is not a cost effective way to deal with large volume of water contaminated by small amount of organic substance or extreme large amount of contaminated water in suburban region (e.g. oil spill in Mexico Gulf, in China Bohai Sea).
Inorganic photocatalysis using solar energy to mineralize organic contaminants in principal is the potentially best solution to these issues and works in the cost effective way. Recently we preliminarily illustrated the key factors dominating the efficiency of process driven by light irradiation.1 Following that, water treatment was carried out in my group which is a challenging topic due to its complexity. In this talk, the mechanism of the chemical process, involving charge transfer and reaction with oxygen, will be addressed and structured/junction material development will be presented, resulting into a few times higher activity for textile water treatment2,3 and simulated river water treatment4,5 compared with the benchmark photocatalyst P25. Furthermore, a new and facile method to synthesize these active photocatalysts will be discussed
