Preparation, Characterization and Performances of Photocatalytic TiO_2-Ag_2O/PESf Membrane for Methylene Blue Removal

This study proposed an effective method of methylene blue (mb) removal using a membrane with photocatalytic properties. the photocatalytic membrane, made of polyethersulfone (pesf) was incorporated with titanium dioxide (tio_2) and silver oxide (ag_2o) as the photocatalyst during the phase inversion process. tio_2 was synthesized using sol-gel method before being modified by ag_2o via wet pre-deposition method. the pesf/tio_2/ag_2o (pta) membrane was characterized using scanning electron microscope coupled with elementary dispersion x-ray (sem-edx), x-ray diffraction analysis (xrd), attenuated fourier transform infrared (atr-ftir), and ultraviolet visible near infrared (uv-vis nir). the pta membrane with 0.2 wt.% loading of tio_2/ag_2o shows uniform distribution of the photocatalyst materials and exhibits the highest degradation of mb at 85%. the tio_2/ag_2o presence was confirmed by the crystallinity analysis using xrd. uv-vis nir revealed that the band gap of tio_2 reduced from 3.2 to 2.1 ev when modified with ag_2o. this proved that membrane separation assisted with photocatalytic degradation is able to perform high degradation of mb dyes and has potential to be applied in industrial application.