About Titania Coatings
Titania Coatings is a senior design team of engineering students at the University of California, Riverside, who are dedicated to developing a solution for air pollution. The team is working to design and perfect a product that will work to passively reduce ambient air pollutants, mainly nitrous oxides (NOx) and volatile organic compounds (VOCs). Our product is a spray coating that utilizes nanoscale Titanium Dioxide (TiO2) and can be applied in a thin layer to any rigid outdoor surface, primarily rooftops. The team's current goal is to create an airshed model of the rate of pollutant oxidation on the surface of treated roof tiles in order to determine the sustainability impact of our product on the environment.
How It Works
Our product utilizes nanoscale TiO2, an oxidative photocatalytic which undergoes a series of reactions in the presence of UV light. When NOx deposits onto the surface of roof tiles treated with our product, they are effectively reduced to solid nitrates, the mechanisms of which are shown in Figure 1. Similarly, VOCs are fully reduced through a number of various reactions to produce different intermediates and the final products of carbon monoxide (CO) and carbon dioxide (CO2). |
Current Progress
Preliminary experiments have indicated that the treated roof tiles have a NOx reducing efficiency of about 68%. Further experimentation is being conducted at the Center for Environmental Research and Technology (CE-CERT) to study the deposition velocity of NOx onto the surface of treated roof tops and in turn a more detailed analysis of our product's efficiency.