Heterogenous photocatalysis: an emerging technology for remediation of VOC contaminated environments

Heterogeneous photocatalysis has been studied in the last two decades for the treatment of contaminated water and wastewaters, and more recently, in the clean up process of contaminated atmosphere. Scientific principles of the method and a survey of the recent literature for aqueous and gas-phase photocatalytic oxidation of volatile organic compounds (VOCs) are presented. The influence of different parameters, types of photoreactors and kinetics of photodegradation are discussed.