A green hydrothermal synthesis route to prepare a porous Ni doped TiO ₂ nanostructured photocatalyst has been developed in this research. Ni doping can increase the visible light photocatalytic performance of TiO ₂ with cycle capability of 5 times.

A simple one-step method was designed for the first time to produce a novel Zn(II) dithiocarbamate/ZnS nanocomposite. The developed Zn(II) dithiocarbamate/ZnS nanocomposite was found to exhibit outstanding performance on Cr⁶⁺ removal from aqueous solutions and the removal rate could reach more than 98% in just a few seconds. Various influencing factors such as the addition quantity, pH value and reaction temperature were investigated in order to determine the optimal removal conditions. It was shown that the Cr⁶⁺ removal ability of the Zn(II) dithiocarbamate/ZnS nanocomposite remained high at almost all the pH values and the degradation rate increased gradually with the reaction temperature up to 323 K. Compared to the traditional catalysts, which usually involve a complex production process with a high cost and a low degradation rate, the novel Zn(II) dithiocarbamate/ZnS nanocomposite has great potential in applications for wastewater treatment.

Configuration model of the amorphous-TiO₂/RGO heterostructure and the photocatalytic activities.

The functionalization of graphene has been reported widely, showing special physical and chemical properties. However, due to the lack of surface functional groups, the poor dispersibility of graphene in solvents strongly limits its engineering applications. This paper develops a novel green “in-situ titania intercalation” method to prepare a highly dispersed graphene, which is enabled by the generation of the titania precursor between the layer of graphene at room temperature to yield titania-graphene nanocomposites (TiO₂-RGO). The precursor of titania will produce amounts of nano titania between the graphene interlayers, which can effectively resist the interfacial van der Waals force of the interlamination in graphene for improved dispersion state. Such highly dispersed TiO₂-RGO nanocomposites were used to modify epoxy resin. Surprisingly, significant enhancement of the mechanical performance of epoxy resin was observed when incorporating the titania-graphene nanocomposites, especially the improvements in tensile strength and elongation at break, with 75.54% and 176.61% increases at optimal usage compared to the pure epoxy, respectively. The approach presented herein is easy and economical for industry production, which can be potentially applied to the research of high mechanical property graphene/epoxy composite system.