Designing Highly Photoactive Hybrid Aerogels for In-Flow Photocatalytic Contaminant Removal Using Silica-Coated Bacterial Nanocellulose Supports.

This study explores the use of silica-coated bacterial nanocellulose (BC) scaffolds with bulk macroscopic yet nanometric internal pores/structures as functional supports for high surface area titania aerogel photocatalysts to design flexible, self-standing, porous, and recyclable BC@SiO-TiO hybrid organic-inorganic aerogel membranes for effective in-flow photo-assisted removal of organic pollutants. The hybrid aerogels were prepared by sequential sol-gel deposition of the SiO layer over BC, followed by coating of the resulting BC@SiO membranes with a porous titania aerogel overlayer of high surface area using epoxide-driven gelation, hydrothermal crystallization, and subsequent supercritical drying. The silica interlayer between the nanocellulose biopolymer scaffold and the titania photocatalyst was found to greatly influence the structure and composition, particularly the TiO loading, of the prepared hybrid aerogel membranes, allowing the development of photochemically stable aerogel materials with increased surface area/pore volume and higher photocatalytic activity.

Supported nanostructured photocatalysts: the role of support-photocatalyst interactions.

Heterogeneous photocatalysis employing semiconductor oxide photocatalysts is a sustainable and promising method for environmental remediation and clean energy generation. In this context, nanostructured photocatalysts, with at least one dimension in the 1‒100 nm size regime, have attracted ever-growing attention due to their unique and often enhanced size-dependent physicochemical properties. While their reduced size ensures enhanced photocatalytic performance, the same makes it difficult and time/energy-demanding to remove/recover such nanostructured photocatalysts from aqueous media.

Bacterial Nanocellulose/MoS Hybrid Aerogels as Bifunctional Adsorbent/Photocatalyst Membranes for Water Decontamination.

To address the problems associated with the use of unsupported nanomaterials, in general, and molybdenum disulfide (MoS), in particular, we report the preparation of self-supported hybrid aerogel membranes that combine the mechanical stability and excellent textural properties of bacterial nanocellulose (BC)-based organic macro/mesoporous scaffolds with the excellent adsorption-cum-photocatalytic properties and high contaminant removal performance of MoS nanostructures. A controlled hydrothermal growth and precise tuning of the synthetic parameters allowed us to obtain BC/MoS-based porous, self-supported, and stable hybrid aerogels with a unique morphology resulting from a molecular precision in the coating of quantum-confined photocatalytic MoS nanostructures (2-4 nm crystallite size) on BC nanofibrils. These BC/MoS samples exhibit high surface area (97-137 m·g) and pore volume (0.

Self-sterilizing ormosils surfaces based on photo-synzthesized silver nanoparticles.

Medical device-related infections represent a major healthcare complication, resulting in potential risks for the patient. Antimicrobial materials comprise an attractive strategy against bacterial colonization and biofilm proliferation. However, in most cases these materials are only bacteriostatic or bactericidal, and consequently they must be used in combination with other antimicrobials in order to reach the eradication condition (no viable microorganisms).