Photocatalytic oxidation of ethanol using ultrasonic modified TiO2; an in-situ diffuse reflectance infrared spectroscopy study

Sonochemical synthesis was employed to make the intrinsic defects in TiO2 (P25) which facilitates good photocatalytic properties. Thereby, the P25 samples are sonicated for various sonication time intervals with the constant pH and temperature. The ultrasonically modified TiO2 nanoparticles were analyzed by various characterization techniques to obtain the information on the crystallinity, band gap, surface morphology, and electron-hole recombination phenomena. These modified TiO2 samples were applied to the photocatalytic oxidation of ethanol and studied their oxidation mechanism by using in-situ FTIR (DRIFT) technique under UV-visible light irradiation. The DRIFT results revealed that the extension of the ultrasonication time yields good photocatalytic performance due to the oxygen deficiencies. Comparatively, the ultrasonically modified TiO2 exhibited the high conversion rate for the ethanol oxidation than the pristine.