Indoor air pollution, listed by the World Health Organization (WHO) as one of the top 10 environmental risk factors for human health, significantly elevates the risk of respiratory diseases, cardiovascular diseases, and cancers upon long-term exposure. Traditional indoor air purification technologies dominated by physical adsorption and filtration have inherent limitations, including mere pollutant phase transfer, easy saturation, and secondary pollution, while chemical purification centered on pollutant mineralization and degradation is the core development direction for radical elimination of indoor air pollution. Novel nanomaterials, featuring ultra-high specific surface area, precisely tunable active sites and electronic structures, and excellent room-temperature catalytic activity, have become the research focus in this field. This review systematically summarizes the characteristics of typical indoor air pollutants and purification scenario requirements, clarifies the core advantages of chemical purification technologies, details the research progress of novel nanomaterial systems in indoor air chemical purification, and dissects the reaction mechanisms and material optimization strategies of core pathways (photocatalysis, room-temperature thermal catalysis, electrocatalysis, plasma catalysis). We also outline the engineering application status and bottlenecks of these nanomaterials, propose systematic future development directions targeting existing challenges, and aim to provide a reference for fundamental research and industrial application of novel nanomaterials in indoor air purification.
Yan et al. (2026) studied this question.