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. 2023 Oct:338:139576.
doi: 10.1016/j.chemosphere.2023.139576. Epub 2023 Jul 18.

Photocatalytic fixation of NOx in soils

Antonio R Sánchez-Rodríguez  1 , Elena Gómez-Álvarez  1 , José M Méndez  1 , Ute M Skiba  2 , Davey L Jones  3 , Dave R Chadwick  4 , María C Del Campillo  1 , Raphael Ba Fernandes  5 , Jörg Kleffmann  6 , Vidal Barrón  7
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Free article

Photocatalytic fixation of NOx in soils

Antonio R Sánchez-Rodríguez et al. Chemosphere. 2023 Oct.
Free article

Abstract

Nitrogen oxides (NOx = NO + NO2) are important atmospheric pollutants that are directly harmful to human health. Recently in urban and industrial areas, synthetic materials have been developed and deployed to photocatalytically oxidize NOx to nitrate (NO3-) in order to improve air quality. We show that the natural presence of small amounts (≤5%) of titanium oxides, such as anatase and rutile, can also drive NOx oxidation to nitrate in soils under UV-visible irradiation. The NO uptake coefficients ranged between 0.1 × 10-6 for sandy soils to 6.4 × 10-5 in the case of tropical clay soils; the latter comparable in efficiency to current industrial man-made catalysts. This photocatalytic N-fixation mechanism offers a new strategy for NOx mitigation from the atmosphere by transforming it into nitrate, and simultaneously provides an energy efficient source of essential fertilizer to agriculture.

Keywords: Anatase; Iron oxides; NO(x) fixation; Natural photocatalysis; Rutile.

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Conflict of interest statement

Declaration of competing interest The authors declare that they have no known competing financial interests or personal relationships that could have appeared to influence the work reported in this paper.

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