TiO2 has been used as a white pigment and studied since the first decades of the XX century for the undesirable chalking of outdoor paintings exposed to sunlight. Since the first report of Honda and Fujishima (1972) of the water splitting by the harvesting of sunlight on a n-type single crystal TiO2 electrode, the engagement of researchers with the field has grown steadily. TiO2-photocatalysis has joined the group of advanced oxidation processes for potential new water and wastewater treatments but, despite of its high chemical and photochemical stability and the great oxidizing power of its photogenerated holes, photons in UVA spectral region are needed to accomplish the high band gap, limiting the yield of sun-driven environmental applications. Nevertheless, this shortcoming has not restricted benchtop research and small and medium scale applications also relying on artificial UV sources, especially nowadays that highly-efficient UVA-LEDs are available. Herein, we review the fundamental aspects and the practical attributions of the trapping model in the charge transfer kinetics of photogenerated holes in nanoparticulate TiO2. Regarding to new practical uses, we focus our attention on some ingenious applications of this photocatalyst in the field of analytical chemistry, covering also subjects never reviewed before.
Keywords:
TiO2-photocatalysis; charge-carriers trapping; HPLC-photoelectrochemical detector; peCOD chemical oxygen demand; photocatalytic sample-pretreatment
