Soft Nanoscience Letters, 2012, 2, 67-70 http://dx.doi.org/10.4236/snl.2012.24012 Published Online October 2012 (http://www.SciRP.org/journal/snl) 67 TiO 2 —Polysulfone Beads for Use in Photo Oxidation of Rhodamine B Sanjay V. Ingale 1 , Pratap B. Wagh 1 , Arvind K. Tripathi 2 , Rohit Srivastav 1 , Imejinary K. Singh 1 , Ramesh C. Bindal 3 , Satish C. Gupta 1 1 Applied Physics Division, Bhabha Atomic Research Centre, Mumbai, India; 2 Chemistry Division, Bhabha Atomic Research Centre, Mumbai, India; 3 Desalination Division, Bhabha Atomic Research Centre, Mumbai, India. Email: svingale@barc.gov.in Received July 24 th , 2012; revised August 27 th , 2012; accepted September 6 th , 2012 ABSTRACT The nano sized TiO 2 has been synthesized by sol gel process. The titaniumisopropaxide diluted in propanol hydrolyzed under acidic condition to form a gel. The solvent from gel pores has been extracted at ambient pressure resulting in nano sized TiO 2 crystallites. The crystalline phase of TiO 2 could be assigned to anatase structure. An average crystallite size is about 12 nm. The surface area of TiO 2 found to be 235 m 2 /g. The TiO 2 nanocrystallites thus produced were blended with polysulphone to form its beads for ease of operation. These beads of TiO 2 were used as photo catalyst in conjunction with H 2 O 2 oxidizer in presence of UV light (254 nm) for treating the 50 ppm Rhodamine B aqueous solu- tion. The solution decolorized within 10 minutes resulting in disappearance of absorption peak at around 600 nm in UV spectrometry. The organic entities degrade in about 60 minutes. The beads of nano sized TiO 2 could be easily recovered from the treated effluent for further use. Keywords: Photo Oxidation; Rhodamine B; TiO 2 Beads; Polysulphone; Nanocrystallite 1. Introduction The semiconductor photo catalysis using titania (TiO 2 ) powdered material is recognized as one of the promising techniques for treating the effluents contaminated with dye materials [1]. It is known that to enhance TiO 2 photo activity, particles should be small enough to offer a high specific surface area for efficient catalytic oxidation. To synthesize high surface area TiO 2 for use in photo oxida- tion of organic contaminants, various processes such as hydrothermal methods using amorphous TiO 2 , TiCl 4 or TiOCl 2 aqueous solutions, and sol-gel methods using titanium alkoxides, have been investigated and reported [2,3]. In spite of good photo catalytic activity, use of TiO 2 in effluent treatment has certain limitations. Use of nano sized TiO 2 is proved to be effective in degradation of organic contaminants [4] but the separation of the TiO 2 powder material from the treated effluent is difficult. This issue has been addressed in the present paper. We synthesized nano sized TiO 2 from alkoxide pre- cursor of Titanium using sol-gel method. The high sur- face area TiO 2 powder thus obtained was blended with polysulphone to form TiO 2 beads. The use of these beads provides large TiO 2 surface area for effective photo oxi- dation of contaminant and avoids mixing of TiO 2 parti- cles with the treated effluent. The TiO 2 beads have been used for treating the aqueous solution containing Rho- damine B dye, a known contaminant in textile industries effluents. The Rhodamine B, used in textiles and food stuffs is known to be harmful due to its carcinogenicity and the effluents containing this waste need to be treated effectively [2]. We developed a photo oxidation process using TiO 2 xerogel beads as catalyst for successful re- moval of Rhodamine from aqueous solution. The advan- tage of using beads of TiO 2 catalyst is that it can be separated easily from the treated effluent. 2. Experimental The nano sized TiO 2 has been synthesized by sol gel process [4] using titanium isopropoxide (TIP) as a pre- cursor for TiO 2 . The Titanium (IV) isopropoxide (97% Aldrich) diluted in propanol (AR grade, Thomas and Bakers) was hydrolyzed under acidic condition to form a gel. The molar ratio of TIP: propanol: hydrofluoric acid (0.1 M) was kept at 1:12:4, respectively. The solvent from gel pores was extracted at ambient pressure result- ing in nano sized TiO 2 xerogel. The crystalline data for the nano sized TiO 2 prepared by sol-gel process was ob- tained on a Philips X-ray diffractometer using a PW 1710 goniometer (CuKα, 30 kV, 20 mA). Commercially available anatase TiO 2 (98%, Aldrich) is used as refer- ence for comparison. The diffracted X-rays were col- lected by scanning between 10.01 to 79.99 ˚ in a scan step Copyright © 2012 SciRes. SNL