Degradation of Ethylene Glycol Through Photo-Fenton Heterogeneous System

Abstract

This work describes the ethylene glycol degradation in a photo-Fenton heterogeneous system. Iron-doped TiO2 photocatalysts prepared by different methods (incipient wet impregnation and sol-gel method), as well as the corresponding un-doped material were examined in this process. Different values of initial pH and H2O2 concentration were tested during the experiments. A lower photoactivity was observed for the un-doped materials than for the Fe-doped materials. Optimum results of initial pH and H2O2 concentrations were found to be 3.0 and 1,000 mg/L, respectively.  Furthermore, the highest degradation percentage of ethylene glycol (61 %) was achieved for the material synthetized by sol-gel method. Such catalytic performance is explained on the basis of structural/morphological and electronic characterization results, reached by XRD, UV-vis DRS and XPS techniques. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first report related with the ethylene glycol degradation using Iron-doped TiO2 in a photo-Fenton heterogeneous system.