Dye wastewater degradation by the synergetic effect of an atmospheric pressure plasma treatment and the photocatalytic activity of plasma-functionalized Cu‒TiO nanoparticles.

In this paper, the photocatalytic activity of plasma-functionalized Cu-doped TiO nanoparticles (NPs) and the oxidization process of atmospheric pressure plasma jet were combined for the degradation of reactive red-198 (RR-198) in aqueous solution. The first part of the study was thus devoted to subject Cu-‒TiO NPs synthetized by the sol-gel method to various plasma treatments operating in air, argon, oxygen and nitrogen to improve their degradation efficiency. The physicochemical properties of the NPs were then assessed by X-ray diffraction (XRD), X-ray photoelectron spectroscopy (XPS) and scanning electron microscopy (SEM) measurements.