P h o t o c a t a l y t i c S u p e r f i c i a l T r e a t m e n t s
177
PHOTOCATALYTIC SUPERFICIAL TREATMENTS:
APPLICABILITY IN CONFINED ENVIRONMENTS
Rossana Paparella
1
1
Department of Civil, Environmental and Architectural Engineering, Padua University, Italy,
Abstract
The study dealt with the indoor pollution topic and the issue of its technological solution
through the treatment of the surfaces with the application of photocatalytic products.
Particularly have been analyzed hospital environments considered to elevated indoor
pollution and for which in Italy exists a specific and rather complex regulation.
Photocatalytic products contain a photocatalyst, the titanium dioxide, that, through the
beaming of a bright source of appropriate light, is activated and that it allows the
degradation of pollutants in the environment. In these last 10 years, a lot of researches
have been conducted regarding these types of products, and the effectiveness of the
degradation has emerged in comparison to the outdoor pollutants; only from few years
the research is addressing to the analysis of the effectiveness or less effectiveness that
the application of these products inside the confined environments could give.
The theme of the indoor pollution is a theme of general interest for the health of the man,
and of the communities. The pollution in the built environment is a non negligible threat
for the health of the inhabitants in comparison to the outdoor pollution. The
dangerousness for the health of the man, consequential from the presence of the
contaminants, is due to the combination of a series of factors related both to the greatest
concentrations of present pollutants inside the closed environments and to the always
great permanence of the individual inside closed places, and to the possibility that these
environments are frequented by a part of population defined weak, as elders, ill people
and children.
Keywords:
photocatalytic products, confined environments, indoor pollution.
Introduction
Indoor air pollution, is one of the fundamental problems for the health of the man. Only
recently, the international scientific community has started to deal with the contamination
of the air in the confined environments. In fact while it is being thought that the air in the
urban centers is loaded with harmful polluting substances for the health of the man, the
dangerousness of the present polluting substances is often ignored in the confined
environments. The reported research is founded on the first conclusions of the work
developed by the group of interdisciplinary study of the university in Padua concerning
the project research titled "Nanotechnologies for the building construction: new
photocatalytic materials based on metal systems-modified titanium dioxide. Application
to concrete and glass-based materials. Technological tests and fields of use for the
proposed innovative materials." Coming from the experimentation, has emerged the
effectiveness of the degradation of the polluting mixtures as phenol and the acetone.
Such degradation has been experimented using photocatalytic commercial paints, dust
of dioxide of titanium Degussa-P25 and dusts of dioxide of titanium and dioxide of
titanium doped with nitrogen, both synthesized in the laboratory. The phase of
experimentation not yet concluded, has verified the effectiveness of the degradative
ability of polluting substances with the use of pollutants like the phenol in water solution
and the acetone in gas phase; the effectiveness towards other pollutants and the nature
of the formed products through the process of photocatalysis has to be verified, as well
