Porous Photocatalytic nanocomposites for environmental engineering

Porous Photocatalytic nanocomposites for environmental engineering
Nowadays, our society come across with several global problems such as air and water pollution, global warming, natural resource depletion and others. Many associations, organizations and groups of scientists are collaborating to find out alternative solutions and to prevent such kind of problems. Especially, there are a lot of the opportunities and the activities which are attracting youth to comprehend significance and importance of those issues for daily and future life. The main tasks are to give wide-range knowledge, to keep in touch with global research field and grow adaptation in solving different kinds of problems which are connected with environment. Moreover, there is being developed a great opportunity to elaborate creativity, innovation and global thinking of new generation who plans to realize ideas that work to make our social life better. However, in today’s economy, despite numerous scientific and technological innovations, investments in Environmental Science and Engineering, the main problem of human still is continuing to be polluted water. A thrust area of research in the field of ‘Environmental Science and Engineering’ is water treatment. The growth of demand for water in the near future will force us to seek environmentally clean technologies for water treatment. Uzbekistan faces with major problems in water supply and sanitation coverage. Waste water generally contains lots of toxic and harmful substances, such as heavy metals, organic contaminants and others, that being discharged from various industrial productions. Drinking water containing these substances causes high rates of some infectious diseases, particularly among children, likely reflect to the households with low incomes, and poor access to water and sanitation facilities; therefore these substances must be eliminated and removed from the waste water before being discharged into the drainage system. Development and improvement of the water supply in urban and rural areas in the former Soviet republics of Central Asia, particularly in Uzbekistan, is a crucial component of the general strategy of economic and social development in those countries. There are usually a number of pollutants in water that need to be dealt with and consequently there are various steps that need to be taken to accomplish that purpose. Public treatment facilities use various steps to disinfect the water and we may end up using more than one water purifier depending on the source of our water. Therefore, new approaches and improved advanced technologies need to be developed to effectively address these water quality challenges. We need a new type of water treatment that can help people to disinfect their own water supply easily, so that their water becomes safe to drink. An ideal method uses easily available energy, such as sunlight, does not require expensive equipment. Besides, the utilization of nanoparticles is a new way for environmental remediation which can be an effective way to solve some problems in this field. Recently, I have been involved Professor Olim Ruzimuradov’s research group in Turin Polytechnic University in Tashkent which has highly-qualified specialists in the field of porous ceramic materials for ecoengineering application, their structural and physico-chemical methods of analysis. They have a high degree of competency in advanced methods for the fabrication of silica and titania adsorbent/catalysts and the investigation of their textural and sorption properties. The depth of the research group’s experience with porous titania based materials allowed me to handle the various aspects of development of photocatalytic materials and application for the degradation of organic contaminants under visible light. Heterogeneous photocatalysis using semiconductors appears as promising oxidation technology. Due to its large surface area and high catalytic activity, TiO₂ particles have shown better efficiency, but complete separation and recycling of fine particles from the treated water is very expensive. Owing to these problems associated with the use of TiO₂ in powder form, there has been an increasing interest in the fabrication of TiO₂ thin films and monoliths. Presently, economic viability is the main obstacle hindering the wide scale implementation of photocatalyzed processes for water treatment. Photocatalytic reactions using TiO₂-based photocatalysts are generally encumbered by low energy efficiencies under solar irradiation. This occurs since the band gap of TiO₂ (E_g> 3.0 eV) limits its photoexcitation to ultraviolet irradiation, which constitutes approximately only 4% of the solar spectrum. This is a technological limitation when aiming at implementation of large scale sustainable “green” technologies with renewable energy sources such as solar light.
Under the supervision of Professor Olim Ruzimuradov, my bachelor degree thesis is focused on the design of visible-light-active TiO₂-based nanocomposite photocatalysts to increase the absorption of visible light and to decrease the rates of electron-hole recombination, resulting in high photocatalytic efficiency in regards to the degradation of organic pollutants in water. However, my knowledge and situation are not enough for carrying out this research, that is why I am not going to stop in my achievements, and I am planning to develop my research more and make affordable and efficient contributions to this very field. The most continuations for realizing my ambitions could be improving my educational background by gaining quality knowledge and working in high-specialized laboratories in well-known European universities. As I know, Erasmus Mundus program provides a response to the challenges of globalization faced by European higher education today, in particular the need to adapt education and research systems to the demands of the knowledge society, to enhance the attractiveness and visibility of European higher education worldwide. Chemical Nano-Engineering (CNE) master course offers original program which focuses on manipulating and fabrication of novel materials at nano-scale. The originality of this program is combining Chemistry and Engineering in the field of Nanotechnology. Studying master course subjects, which are oriented in chemical synthesis and characterization, numerical design and modeling of nano-system, allows me to learn deeper following items:
♦ Facile synthesis of hierarchically porous metalloxide based nanostructural materials;
♦ Fabrication of metal oxide-polymer-derived mesoporous nanocomposites;
♦ Computational Modeling of porous nanocomposite systems
♦ Physical-chemical analysis of porous nanocomposites and their application aspects;
Moreover, CNE master program helps me to continue researches on developing a rational methodology for the synthesis of hierarchically porous hybrid ceramic composites consisting of metal oxide nanoparticles supported on polymer derived ceramic substrates. These materials, exhibiting controlled structures across multiple scales and polyfunctional surfaces, represent a new class of surface area enhanced visible-light active photocatalysts. A key aspect of applying to Chemical Nano-Engineering (CNE) master program will be transfer of knowledge and dissemination of research across Europe and Uzbekistan. The Scholarship will allow me to achieve world-class scientific technological training at the cutting-edge of chemical nano-engineering and transfer this back to my home country, thus enabling the establishment of a wider European research area. Advances in nanomaterials engineering does not only concern eco-engineering, it also has the potential to reshape our whole industry, keeps our lives and environment clean for next generation.