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.