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A research team from TU Wien and the Università Politecnica delle Marche, Italy develops special titanium oxide nanoparticles. It can be added to ordinary, commercially available wall paint to establish self-cleaning power.
The nanoparticles are photocatalytically active. They can use sunlight not only to bind substances from the air, but also to decompose them afterwards. The wall makes the air cleaner and cleans itself at the same time. Waste was used as the raw material for the new wall paint – metal scrap. It would otherwise have to be discarded, and dried fallen leaves.
Catalysis research leads to a new wall paint that cleans itself when exposed to sunlight and chemically breaks down air pollutants. A wide variety of pollutants occur in indoor air – from residues of cleaning agents and hygiene products to molecules. These are produced during cooking or that are emitted by materials such as leather. In some cases, this can lead to health issues, which is then referred to as ‘sick building syndrome’.
“For years, people have been trying to use customized wall paints to clean the air,” said professor Günther Rupprechter from the Institute of Materials Chemistry at TU Wien. “Titanium oxide nanoparticles are particularly interesting in this context. They can bind and break down a wide range of pollutants.” However, simply adding ordinary titanium oxide nanoparticles to the paint will affect the durability of the paint. Just as pollutants are degraded by the nanoparticles, they can also make the paint itself unstable and create cracks. In the worst case, volatile organic compounds can even be released, which in turn can be harmful to health. After a certain time, the paint layer becomes gray and tinted, finally it has to be renewed.
However, the nanoparticles can clean themselves if they are irradiated with UV light. Titanium oxide is a so-called photocatalyst – a material that enables chemical reactions when exposed to suitable light. The UV radiation creates free charge carriers in the particles.
This induces decomposition of the trapped pollutants from air into small parts and their release. In this way, the pollutants are rendered harmless, but do not remain permanently attached to the wall paint. The wall color remains stable in the long term.
In practice, however, this is of little use. It would be tedious to repeatedly irradiate the wall with intense UV light in order to drive the self-cleaning process. “Our goal was therefore to modify these particles in such a way that the photocatalytic effect can also be induced by ordinary sunlight,” continued Rupprechter. This is achieved by adding certain additional atoms to the titanium oxide nanoparticles, such as phosphorus, nitrogen, and carbon. As a result, the light frequencies that can be harvested by the particles change, and instead of just UV light, photocatalysis is then also triggered by ordinary visible light.
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