Photocatalytic activity of titanium dioxide modified concrete materials – Influence of utilizing recycled glass cullets as aggregates

Combining the use of photocatalysts with cementitious materials is an important development in the field of photocatalytic air pollution mitigation. This paper presents the results of a systematic study on assessing the effectiveness of pollutant degradation by concrete surface layers that incorporate a photocatalytic material – Titanium Dioxide. The photocatalytic activity of the concrete samples was determined by photocatalytic oxidation of nitric oxide (NO) in the laboratory. Recycled glass cullets, derived from crushed waste beverage bottles, were used to replace sand in preparing the concrete surface layers. Factors, which may affect the pollutant removal performance of the concrete layers including glass color, aggregate size and curing age, were investigated. The results show a significant enhancement of the photocatalytic activity due to the use of glass cullets as aggregates in the concrete layers. The samples fabricated with clear glass cullets exhibited threefold NO removal efficiency compared to the samples fabricated with river sand. The light transmittance property of glass was postulated to account for the efficiency improvement, which was confirmed by a separate simulation study. But the influence of the size of glass cullets was not evident. In addition, the photocatalytic activity of concrete surface layers decreased with curing age, showing a loss of 20% photocatalytic activity after 56-day curing.