Stable TiO2-USY Zeolite Composite Coatings for Efficient Adsorptive and Photocatalytic Elimination of Geosmin from Water

© The Royal Society of Chemistry 2015. Geosmin is an unpleasant tasting germacranoid sesquiterpene to which human taste buds are sensitive even at the parts per trillion (ppt) level. The elimination of this molecule from water is a great scientific challenge due to the extremely low concentration needing to be removed. In this paper, we report simple fabrication of stable titania (TiO2) and Y zeolite composite coatings via a layer-by-layer dip-coating approach for efficient adsorptive and photocatalytic elimination of geosmin up to 99% from 100 ppt geosmin aqueous solution within 120 minutes at 35°C under UV light. Zeolite coatings are also found to be highly efficient for adsorptive elimination of geosmin at a minute concentration of 4 ppt, the typical concentration level found in aquaculture water. Geosmin concentrations in the ppt range were determined by the headspace solid phase microextraction (HS-SPME) technique in combination with gas chromatography-mass spectrometry (GC-MS). This study demonstrates the potential of a composite coating comprising zeolite Y for concentrating, and TiO2 photocatalyst for eliminating geosmin in drinking water production and aquaculture water purification.crosscheck: This document is CrossCheck deposited copyright_licence: The Royal Society of Chemistry has an exclusive publication licence for this journal copyright_licence: This article is freely available. This article is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution Non Commercial 3.0 Unported Licence (CC BY-NC 3.0) history: Received 4 November 2014; Accepted 27 November 2014; Accepted Manuscript published 27 November 2014; Advance Article published 12 December 2014; Version of Record published 20 January 2015status: publishe