Interfering effects in the measurement of BTEX depollution in air by photocatalytic materials

In the determination of the activity of photocatalytic materials towards the degradation of air pollutants there are several potential interfering effects that could degrade the precision of the measurement. In this work it was investigated the effect of variations of irradiance, relative humidity, temperature and oxygen concentration in the determination of BTEX degradation in air by TiO2 (Degussa P25) using a stirred flow photoreactor. The obtained results indicates the critical parameters to be controlled during a catalytic depollution measurement. The measures reported in this work relate to pure titanium dioxide samples but the results can be used as starting point in the definition of research and normalized measurement methods.