Photolysis Essay

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Photocatalysis for water disinfection
Although there are a lot of conventional water treatment methods available, but due to their disadvantages, there is a need for development of new and effective methods for disinfection of total waterborne pathogens in water treatment. In the near future, advanced oxidation process (AOPs) may become the most widely used water treatment technologies [30, 31, 32]. The processes can be categorized into three types:
(1) Photolysis.
(2) Homogeneous photocatalysis.
(3) Heterogeneous photocatalysis.
The photolysis methods are mainly based on combinations of UV, H2O2/UV, O3/UV and H2O2/O3/UV [33]. In direct UV photolysis, the incident light is absorbed by the contaminants for the subsequent degradation in its photochemically excited state. This process depends strongly on the light absorbility of the targeted contaminants. Since most of the contaminants are not highly photochemically active, this process is difficult to achieve under conventional conditions. For the H2O2/UV and O3/UV processes, the oxidative degradation occurs through the chemical generation of highly reactive hydroxyl radicals (•OH) which attack most organic compounds. The necessity of UV light limits the broad use of solar light, resulting in the increased energy consumption and equipment requirements.
Homogeneous photocatalysis is …show more content…

This type of Photocatalysis involves solid materials, usually semiconductor catalysts which may absorb appropriate light and generate chemical oxidants such as hydroxyl radicals in situ from dissolved oxygen [22]. Heterogeneous photocatalysis can be performed in various media, such as gas phase, pure organic liquid phases or aqueous solutions. The whole process of heterogeneous photocatalysis can be explained in five steps

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