Electrochemical degradation of phenol on the La and Ru doped Ti/SnO2-Sb electrodes

La and Ru doped Ti/SnO2-Sb electrodes were prepared by thermal decomposition and characterized by scanning electron microscopy (SEM), X-ray diffraction (XRD) and X-ray photoelectron spectroscopy (XPS). It confirmed that the surface of the La and Ru doped Ti/SnO2-Sb electrodes presents a certain microspherical structure formed by aggregates of nanoparticles, which increases the specific area greatly and provides more active sites. The enhanced performance of the La and Ru doped electrodes arose from the increased adsorption capacity of hydroxyl radicals. Cyclic voltammetry (CV) and electrochemical impedance spectroscopy (EIS) showed an improvement of the electrochemical capacity for the La and Ru doped Ti/SnO2-Sb electrodes. The electrochemical oxidation performance of the prepared electrode was further studied using phenol as a model pollutant. UV scans revealed that both phenol and its intermediate products are more rapidly decomposed, especially in the early stage of oxidation on the La and Ru doped electrodes. The removals of chemical oxygen demand (COD) were 86.4% and 82.1% on the Ti/SnO2-Sb-La and Ti/SnO2-Sb-Ru electrodes, respectively, which were higher than that on the SnO2-Sb/Ti electrode (60.1%). The doped electrodes are demonstrated to have superior electrochemical oxidation ability for phenol.