Some Potential Uses of Titanium Dioxide

Sometime ago, we have talked about using titanium dioxide coated paint for medical device industry because it has the ability to kill bacteria and mold. Think about it farther, we can also coat the bed rails, tables, TV remote controls, and pens with titanium dioxide which are used very frequently in our daily life and easy to get effected by bacteria and mold. Currently, there are nearly 300,000 people die per year from Staph infections, we have to stop it. Luckily we get titanium dioxide which works great to protect against bacteria forming. There are many uses of titanium dioxide that have been applied, such as self-cleaning furniture, medical devices, clean rooms and even clean teeth.

Titanium dioxide could be used for pay phones, pens at public bank, paint of buses, car coatings, shopping carts in supermarket, etc. Titanium dioxide used to release the ionic bonding of debris, organic waste, bonding of dirt might be effective against the infectious problems in our public restrooms, schools, locker rooms and all the way through our society.

There are many people out there who never use a toilet seat in any business establishment that they go to. They can not be blamed because everyone does not want to catch any disease. But actually most businesses clean their restrooms often and it is relatively safe. But you would not know what really is not safe. Things like the pens in the banks or those little pens you use to sign your credit card or those little key pads you use to type in your passwords when you buy something. Do you know the reason why they are not clean? Well, the answer is obvious; they have more germs on them that a shopping cart is used all day with kids dribbling on the handles.

For this reason, we need to borrow some technology used in self-cleaning industry and titanium dioxide perfectly fits in since it can kill germs, bacteria and viruses. Why not use titanium dioxide coatings for all these pens at banks, stores and post office? Just imagine it, with the use of titanium dioxide coatings, the spread of flu, disease, viruses and germs will be prevented.

We must work on how to stop these staph infections and the huge amount of death caused each year. If we can not protect ourselves from this challenge, we will risk more lives and more expense of our people. In my opinion, some tiny things are really “terrorists” in our lives. We need to take action and use more titanium dioxide to fight against them.

Titanium Dioxide Coatings Used in Medical Device Industry

In the last post we talked about titaniumdioxide paint is self-cleaning and it can be used for outdoor furniture to prevent the insult of bacteria and mold. Today we are going to discover another feature of titanium dioxide coatings.

Medical device industry is a special industry that has a very strict limit on the materials. There are a wide range of properties that must be carefully evaluated, such as corrosion, bio-compatibility, and strength-to-weight ratio. These particular requirements make titanium dioxide the perfect material to be used in medical device industry due to its resistance to corrosion, strong chemical properties and sufficient bio-compatibility.

To be more specific to the applications of titanium dioxide in the medical device industry, one of the advantages is that titanium dioxide can stimulate the speed of bone cell growth. Scientists discovered that bone cells can grow almost 80 percent faster putting on a surface made of titanium dioxide fibers, which is incredibly small (thousands of times smaller than a human hair).

The scientists create a particular mix of materials and gases by putting a smooth titanium dioxide surface into a furnace and cause tiny filaments of titanium dioxide to sprout from the surface. As a result, a coating of aluminum oxide around them is generated.

They do some further tests to see how well the bone cancer cells would grow using this nanowire surface compared to a smooth titanium dioxide surface. The tests show that the nanowire surface was host to about half more cells per centimeter than other surface. It means that titanium dioxide nanowires are highly effective in the experimental situation and in the future they may be able to have a big impact on the medical industry. They are very easy to produce and we can look forward to more progress in this area in the near future.

Why is titanium dioxide so successful? It is not only used in medical device industry, but also in sunscreens, paints, plastics, paper and many other chemical products. A titanium dioxide added coating changes the way a surface reacts with its environment, making it much easier to self-clean and disinfect.

Titanium dioxide is a unique material that offers high bio-compatibility and strong chemical properties. It will absolutely continue to be developed with new applications in the medical industry in the future.

Titanium Dioxide Paint Is Self-Cleaning

In ancient times, people use plants to draw pictures of things like animals, trees, and other creatures they are interested in, leaving original art works for us to find out. As time goes by, the science of paints and coatings is developing and evolving. The painting industry has gone through the period of using raw materials to complex chemical ingredients auto sprayed by robotic sprayers today. We are seeing a significant change in paint application chemistry.

Two years ago, scientists in Germany discovered that some kind of furniture can “clean” itself if it is painted with a titanium dioxide coating. Adding some titanium dioxide to outdoor furniture can prevent certain bacteria and mold from growing on the coatings. Someone has done an experiment for several years observing the titanium dioxide coated furniture exposed to outdoor environment which shows that the tables and chairs looked as clean as the day they were put there. Therefore, many paint manufacturers would advertise their products having the capability to staying clean on its own and do not need to be cleaned up all the time. This is really a great advantage over their competitors.

Let’s get back to 1960s, there was a Japanese scientist discovered that when the titanium dioxide was stimulated by ultraviolet light from the sun it would destroy the molecules that allowed the growth of bacteria and mold. The use of titanium dioxide for paint is not a new practice. However, this technology was not adopted in manufacture process in the past 50 years. Not until 20^th century, scientists found that this technology could be used in interior paint to move against the dirt. After some time, scientists move forward with this research and were able to make the materials exposed to outdoor environment where the bacteria and mold would be a lot stronger in theory.

This recently developed chemical innovation is changing the products and services that are related to titanium dioxide coatings. Some years ago, paint was only considered a decorative or protective coating on which it was applied. Since the technology of paint is developing rapidly, the coatings are able to offer unique values and features all by themselves. Scientists all over the world are seeking ways trying to make paint retain its color and not crack over time. What they are desperate to achieve is not only the common properties of coatings, but also new functions that can generate more exciting results. The use of titanium dioxide certainly gives a breakthrough to coating industry, but the innovation of titanium dioxide coatings will not end here.

Titanium Dioxide Roofs Could Fight Air Pollution

UC Riverside researchers say they have demonstrated an inexpensive roof coating that gobbles up smog-forming pollutants and, if widely adopted, could clean tons of air pollution from Southern California each day.

In a laboratory experiment, engineering students found that ordinary clay roof tiles sprayed with titanium dioxide removed 88% to 97% of nitrogen oxide pollution from the air.

Nitrogen oxides, gases generated by fuel combustion and emitted from vehicle exhaust pipes, industrial stacks and power plants, react in sunlight to form ozone, the main ingredient of smog. But titanium dioxide, a chalky white compound, breaks down those pollutants into less harmful compounds.

The researchers calculated that if 1 million roofs were sprayed with the smog-eating compound they could remove 21 tons of nitrogen oxides from the air each day. That’s about 4% of the roughly 500 tons of nitrogen oxides emitted a day in California’s South Coast air basin, the nation’s smoggiest region that includes heavily populated areas of Los Angeles, Orange, Riverside and San Bernardino counties.

“By removing one of the components from the reaction that produces ozone or smog, we can have some impact on improving air quality,” said Kawai Tam, a lecturer in UC Riverside’s Department of Chemical and Environmental Engineering who helped oversee the research project completed earlier this year by undergraduate students.

The results are encouraging, Tam said, because they show even a light coating of titanium dioxide can be effective. It would take only about $5 worth of the compound to treat the existing roof tiles of an average-sized home, she said.

The research is not the first to quantify the air-purifying abilities of titanium dioxide, a compound that is commonly found in paint, sunscreen, makeup and other consumer products.

A study published last year, for instance, found that a city street in the Netherlands outfitted with titanium dioxide-coated paving blocks reduced nitrogen oxide air pollution by up to 45%.

While titanium dioxide roofing tiles are already available commercially, Tam said, they are expensive and few studies have examined how effective they are at curbing pollution.

In the UC Riverside experiment, researchers placed titanium dioxide-coated roof tiles inside a miniature atmospheric chamber they built from wood, Teflon and PVC pipes. They pumped the chamber full of nitrogen oxides and illuminated it with ultraviolet light to simulate sunlight. They then measured pollution concentrations to find that they plummeted over about a 20-minute period.

The next step, Tam said, could be to test how the smog-cutting coating performs in the real world and whether it can be produced in a variety of colors suitable for application on homes. 

The researchers would also like to study whether adding titanium dioxide to paint and splashing it on walls, concrete and dividers along major highways would cut air pollution from traffic.

Original article: http://www.latimes.com/science/sciencenow/la-sci-sn-smog-busting-roof-tiles-20140605-story.html