Impact of stirring regime on piezocatalytic dye degradation using BaTiO3 nanoparticles

There is increasing demand to use readily accessible waste energy to drive environmentally friendly processes. Piezocatalysis, the process of converting mechanical energy such as vibration into a chemical process, is a breakthrough next generation approach to meet this challenge. However, these systems currently focus on using ultrasound to drive the chemical reaction and are therefore expensive to operate. We show that by using simple mechanical stirring and BaTiO3 particles we can remove Rhodamine B dye molecules from solution. After evaluating a range of stirring parameters, we demonstrate that there is an interplay between stirring speed, volume of liquid, catalyst structure and rate of dye removal. Our maximum degradation rate was 12.05 mg. g-1 catalyst after 1 h of mechanical stirring at favourable conditions. This development provides a new insight into a low energy physical technique that can be used in environmental remediation processes.