Enhanced and Selective Degradation of Pollutants over Cyclodextrin/TiO₂ under Visible Light Irradiation

The photocatalytic performance of cyclodextrin modified TiO2 (TiO2/β-CD) on the degradation of rhodamine B and bisphenol A (BPA) was studied in this work. The interactions between β-CD and TiO2 varied as the synthesis method changes. When applying TiO2/β-CD synthesized from photoinduced self-assembly method as photocatalyst, the initial visible light (λ ≥ 420 nm) degradation rates R0 of rhodamine B and BPA increased by 4.6 and 3.2 times respectively. The TiO2/β-CD hybrid material synthesized from adsorption method only showed enhancement in dye pollutants degradation. The reactivity of TiO2/β-CD under visible light was correlated with the specific surface area of unmodified semiconductor. The mechanism for the enhanced and selective degradation of pollutants over TiO2/β-CD was also proposed in this work.