Photodegradation of rhodamine 6G in presence of Ag/TiO2 photocatalyst

In this work, the commercial titanium dioxide P25 was doped with silver ions via wet impregnation method, in order to improve its catalytic activity. It is already well established that Ag ions can improve the activity of a catalyst and diminish the electron-holes recombination rate. The catalysts obtained by samples calcination at 450 and 600oC were tested as heterogeneous photocatalysts in the degradation of Rhodamine 6G, a very stable fluorescent dye.
The obtained results confirm the improvement of the catalytic activity, compared to TiO2 P25. Despite the degradation efficiency is not very high, it is worthy to note that the Ag doped catalyst has a higher activity compared to commercial P25. Thus, we can conclude that modifying the catalyst surface leads to an improvement of the properties, probably by forming an intermediate energy level between the valence and conduction bands of TiO2.