Photoelectrochemical properties and reactivity of supported titanium NTs for bacterial inactivation and organic pollutant removal

In this work, we report on the effect of anodization time on the morphology, optical, and photocatalytic properties of TiO 2 nanotubes (NTs) allowing bacterial inactivation and two organic pollutant degradation under low-intensity solar-simulated light. Scanning electron microscopy (SEM) showed that the length of the TiO 2 NTs increased from 2.8 to 25.8 μm as anodization time was increased from 15 to 300 min at 60 V, respectively. The X-ray diffraction (XRD) patterns showed that all samples crystallize in the anatase phase after annealing at 400 °C for 3 h. Samples anodized for 30 and 60 min exhibit low diffuse reflection at 400 nm, which was attributed to the disorder-induced exciton scattering at the molecular level. The intensity of the photoluminescence (PL) spectra was found to increase as the length of the NTs increases up to a maximum anodization time of 300 min, revealing the contribution of bulk excitonic states. A maximum photoelectric conversion efficiency of 0.55% was obtained at a potential of − 0.5 V vs. Ag/AgCl for TiO 2 NTs anodized for 60 min. The optimized NTs (anodized for 60 min) showed a photocatalytic bacterial inactivation of a magnitude of 6 log within 360 min and a degradation of indole and methylene blue (MB) under low-intensity solar-simulated light (50 mW/cm 2 ). The stability of the prepared catalyst was tested over several cycles.