Proceedings of Materials for Sustainable Development Conference (MAT-SUS) (NFM22)
DOI: https://doi.org/10.29363/nanoge.nfm.2022.046
Publication date: 11th July 2022
Glycerol is a residue generated in biodiesel production that has a low economic value due to its overproduction. Recently, different oxidation processes have been developed for glycerol oxidization towards added value products such as dihydroxyacetone or formic acid, one of them being the photoelectrochemical route that improves the process efficiency using solar light. In this work we have synthetized and studied BiVO4 and TiO2 semiconductor electrodes with the objective of evaluating their activity as photocatalysts using different experimental conditions (electrolyte and pH). The studied support electrolytes are sodium sulphate and sodium phosphate at pH 2 and 7. The results show that in an acidic Na2SO4 0,5 M medium the BiVO4 electrode presents its maximum photocurrent and in a neutral Na2SO4 0,5 M medium TiO2 electrode reaches its best performance. It has been assessed that faradaic efficiencies towards glycerol oxidation follows an opposite trend to water oxidation, the latter being more favoured using TiO2 than BiVO4 electrodes. The oxidation product analysis by HPLC and H-NMR shows that BiVO4 presents better faradaic efficiency for glycerol oxidation than TiO2 but with a lower selectivity towards a given product. Furthermore, in all cases, it has been proved the beneficial role of illumination with respect to dark electrolysis. It has been observed that the use of phosphate ions as supporting electrolyte is harmful for the glycerol oxidation due to the peroxide generation, besides the instability of BiVO4 in acidic phosphate electrolyte. On the contrary, using sulphate anions as the supporting electrolyte it has been achieved faradaic efficiencies over 80 % with a constant selectivity at different reaction times.
The work has been funded by project PID2019-108136RB-C33 (MCIN/AEI/10.13039/501100011033).
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