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Photocatalysis for Organic Pollutants Degradation

A special issue of Molecules (ISSN 1420-3049). This special issue belongs to the section "Photochemistry".

Deadline for manuscript submissions: 31 October 2025 | Viewed by 41

Special Issue Editor


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Guest Editor
Key Laboratory of Photochemistry, Institute of Chemistry, Chinese Academy of Sciences, Beijing 100084, China
Interests: photodegradation; photocatalysis; selective oxidation
Special Issues, Collections and Topics in MDPI journals

Special Issue Information

Dear Colleagues,

Degradation and control of persistent, highly toxic organic pollutants, especially those accumulated in different waters, are pivotal to global ecological security. Advanced oxidation technologies (AOTs) are playing a more and more important role in both source treatment (high concentration) and extensive watershed treatment (low concentration) of these organic pollutants because they are aimed at converting organic pollutants into CO2, H2O, and mineralized inorganic ions. However, for many years, AOTs have remained difficult to apply on a large scale; the main obstacles are high energy consumption and cost. As a result, photocatalytic degradation and photooxidative degradation by utilizing solar energy are the only feasible ways to thoroughly solve the bottleneck of AOT. To this end, researchers focus on designing more efficient photocatalysts through varying composition, structure, morphology, etc. In addition, there are many chemical reactions of environmental pollutants in the natural world, including soil, water, atmosphere, and even plant media forced by solar irradiation.

The photochemical application for eliminating organic pollutants in water mainly includes the following aspects: (1) the processes of organic pollutant molecules being oxidized, reduced, hydrolyzed, and finally broken into CO2, H2O, and inorganic ion X-; (2) photo-induced catalyst (or sensitizer) activates molecular oxygen O2, O3, H2O2, S2O82-, Cl2, ClO2, etc. and the influence factors of the solution; (3) generation pathway and characterization of various species of reactive oxygen species and photo-generated holes/electron pairs in homogeneous or heterogeneous systems; (4) analysis and characterization of intermediate products in degradation of organic pollutants. Therefore, this Special Issue only encompasses the aforementioned four aspects and mainly focuses on the studies of homogeneous and heterogeneous photodegradation degradation of environmental organic pollutants.

Prof. Dr. Wanhong Ma
Guest Editor

Manuscript Submission Information

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Keywords

  • photocatalytic degradation of organic pollutants in waters
  • design and preparation of photocatalyst
  • homo- and heterogeneous photo-catalyzed process
  • intermediate fragments and intermediate organic pollutants
  • reactive oxygen species (ROS)

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