Nataša Novak Tušar

National Institute of Chemistry and University of Novo Gorica, Slovenia

Title: Engineering photocatalysts for clean air

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Biography

Prof. Dr. Nataša Novak Tušar has been the head of the Laboratory of Environmental Science and Engineering at the Department of Inorganic Chemistry and Technology at the National Institute of Chemistry in Ljubljana since 2020. Since 2018 she has been a full professor and director of the PhD program "Materials" at University Nova Gorica, Slovenia. After obtaining her PhD in Chemistry at University of Ljubljana, she was Individual Marie Curie Fellow at the synchrotron ELETTRA and at the University of Trieste, Italy, from 2003-2004. She is a member of the governing bodies of ENMIX (European Nanoporous Materials Institute of Excellence) and EFCATS (European Federation of Catalysis Societies).

Abstract

In today’s world, clean air is one of the top priorities of humanity due to human health and climate change. Air pollution refers to the release of pollutants into the air from industrial processes, transportation, and consumer products. Both controlling the sources of pollution and air cleaning are important for improving air quality. The lecture focuses on the engineering of low-cost and environmentally friendly photocatalysts for indoor air cleaning. Titanium dioxide (TiO₂) is the most used material for mentioned application due to its interesting characteristics: low cost, high stability, shows high photocatalytic activity, it can promote ambient temperature oxidation of the major class of organic pollutants. However, due to the hindered applications of TiO₂ as non-supported systems for photocatalytic air cleaning, design and development of TiO₂ supported systems are very important. Common support materials are SiO₂, Al₂O_3, zeolites (aluminosilicates), carbon etc. These materials exhibit high specific surface areas, high porosities in a variety of pore sizes, and high thermal and mechanical stability, while they are mostly chemically inert. Here, an overview of the design and development of mechanically stable TiO₂-SiO₂ coatings for removal of the volatile organic pollutants from the air is presented. Engineering of photocatalysts consisting of a) SiO₂ supported TiO₂ working under UV light and b) SiO₂ supported TiO₂ functionalized with transition metals working under visible light is discussed.