The aim of this study was to modify surface properties of immobilized rutile TiO₂ using Argon cold plasma treatment and to evaluate the performance of the catalyst in photocatalytic elimination of synthetic dyes in UV/TiO₂/H₂O₂ process. The surface-modified TiO₂ was characterized by XRD, EDX, SEM, UV-DRS and XPS analyses. Response surface methodology was adopted to achieve high catalyst efficiency by evaluating the effect of two main independent cold plasma treatment parameters (exposure time and pressure) on surface modification of the catalyst. The increase of the plasma operation pressure led to higher decolorization percentage, while the increase of plasma exposure time decreased the decolorization efficiency. RSM methodology predicted optimum plasma treatment conditions to be 0.78 Torr and 21 min of exposure time, which resulted in decolorization of 10 mg/L solution of the malachite green solution by 94.94% in 30 min. The plasma treatment decreased the oxygen to titanium ratio and caused oxygen vacancy on the surface of the catalyst, resulting in the superior performance of the plasma-treated catalyst. Pseudo first-order kinetic rate constant for the plasma-treated catalyst was 4.28 and 2.03 times higher than the rate constant for the non-treated photocatalyst in decolorization of aqueous solutions of malachite green and crystal violet, respectively.
Keywords: TiO2; cold plasma; nano-catalyst; photocatalysis; surface modification.