Polyol Low‐Eutectic Solvent‐Assisted Preparation of Defective TiO 2 for Photochemical Degradation of Organic Pollutants

Abstract This work created deep eutectic solvents (DESs) by employing ethylene glycol (EG), gamma‐glycol (G), and erythritol (E) as hydrogen‐bond donors (HBD) and choline chloride (ChCl) as the hydrogen bond acceptor (HBA). With DES acting as both a solvent and a carbon source, defective TiO 2 was created via the sol‐gel technique. According to research, DES works well as a templating agent to reduce the size of TiO 2 particles. Oxygen vacancy defects are common in ChCl/E‐TiO 2 , as shown by XPS and EPR tests. The UV–vis DRS analysis and photocatalytic degradation experiments showed that the sample ChCl/E‐TiO 2 ’s response range to light was extended to the visible and near‐infrared spectra in addition to the UV spectrum. The photocatalytic degradation of methylene blue solution (MB) at 20 mg/L reached 90.3% in 2 h, which was 5.98 times higher than that of the pure TiO 2 .