Water pollution is one of the major issues of 21st century. Emerging pollutants such as pharmaceuticals and personal care products (PPCPs), pesticides, industrial additives, microplastics and flame retardants are recently identified chemicals and compounds that can potentially create danger to environment and health of human beings at very low concentrations. They are released along with other pollutants from household and industrial activities as wastewater. Currently, secondary wastewater treatment facilities are not efficient in removing emerging pollutants. This leads to severe deterioration in water quality.
Advanced oxidation processes (AOPs) are found to be a promising technology for the degradation of emerging pollutants. AOPs generate reactive oxygen species (ROS) for the non-selective degradation of organic pollutants. Piezocatalysis is an emerging AOP for the degradation of emerging pollutants. Piezoelectric material under mechanical force could form ROS due to generation of piezopotential, which can be used for the removal of emerging pollutants. Perovskites are widely used piezocatalysts due to their non-centrosymmetric nature. However, single perovskites are not efficient due to high electron-hole recombination and screening of the generated piezopotential. Therefore, the research is aimed to develop a piezocatalytic heterojunctions for the degradation of the emerging contaminants from aqueous solution. In this research work, piezocatalytic heterojunction was synthesized and characterized using different analytical techniques. Degradation efficiency of the optimized piezocatalytic heterojunction was tested for a model antibiotic, i.e. metronidazole (MET) via batch studies. This seminar presentation will highlight the detailed literature review on piezocatalysis, preparation of piezocatalytic heterojunction and its application for the treatment of recalcitrant organic pollutants.