Prof. Colmenares was invited to give a lecture (via Zoom) for “the Salzberg Chemistry Seminar Series”, Department of Chemistry and Biochemistry o the City College in New York. Monday, May 10, 2021, at 12 noon EDT.
Title of the lecture: “Merging sonication with heterogeneous photocatalysis: Environmental and Energy Applications”.
About the lecture: Mechanochemical approaches, and especially sonication, have a high potential to expand the design and synthesis fields in materials chemistry and process intensification, leading to new surface features with unique multifunctional entities, the deposition of a photocatalyst layer in the internal wall of a microreactor, and improving the kinetics of a plethora of organic reactions. Our latest research efforts have been focused on the development of new synthetic routes by employing sonochemistry as a complementary process and, simultaneously, an intensification tool leading to nanostructured TiO2 of a high photoreactivity/selectivity, the controlled functionalization with titania of a Teflon-based microreactor, and changing excellently the performances of batch-based liquid phase photocatalytic organic synthesis. This lecture is a report of selected experiments of titania-based photocatalysis‘s intensification using flow microphotoreactors for selective photo-oxidation of aromatic alcohols, using sonication to intensify the same type of reaction in the batch system, and the use of sonication’s waves for the synthesis of a peculiar TiO2 with excellent performances in a gaseous phase by decomposing toxic vapors of chemical warfare agents (a mustard-gas surrogate), or in a liquid phase by selectively oxidizing benzyl alcohol, a model lignin-biomass-derived compound. (Adv. Funct. Mater., 31 (2021) 2007115; Green Chem., 22 (2020) 4896; Mol. Catal., 486 (2020) 110884).
Acknowledgments: This work was supported by the National Science Centre in Poland within Sonata Bis 5 Project No. 2015/18/E/ST5/00306, OPUS-13 project nr 2017/25/B/ST8/01592, and Miniatura 2 project nr 2018/02/X/ST5/03531.
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