Titanium oxide nanoparticles toxicity

Federici G, Shaw BJ, Handy RD (2007) Toxicity of titanium dioxide nanoparticles to rainbow trout (Oncorhynchus mykiss) Gill injury, oxidative stress, and other physiological effects. Aquat Toxicol 84 415 30... 

Phenol is one of the toxic materials in municipal and wastewater. Titanium dioxide nanoparticles of both anatase and rutile forms were synthesized by hydrothermal treatment of microemulsions and used in the wet oxidation of phenol [363]. The advantage of this method of preparation is that the size of particles can be affected by the ratio of surfactant to water. Size of water droplets in the reverse microemulsions is approximately the same as that of formed particles. The main reactions in phenol degradation are [363] ... 

In the first class of CPs nanocomposites, the oxides considered as secondary component are titanium dioxide (TiO ), zirconium dioxide (ZrOj), silicon dioxide (SiO ), aluminium oxide (Al O ), cadmium oxide (CdO) and zinc oxide (ZnO) [19, 27, 31, 48-52]. Titanium dioxide nanoparticles have excellent properties such as charge carrier, oxidising power, non-toxicity, chemical and photo stability. Conductive PANI/TiO nanocomposites combine the qualities of PANI and nanocrystalline TiO within a single material, thereby developing multifunctional materials with combined properties which have very strong potential applications. 

Recent research has indicated that, when evaluated on a normalized size basis, insoluble nanoparticles are more potent than larger particles of the same composition in causing lung inflammation and tumors in animals. A complicating factor in this research is that nanoparticle toxicity is also affected by the chemicals that comprise individual particles. For example, nanoparticles made of titanium oxide showed little if any lung toxicity, while particles made of crystallized silica caused severe lung toxicity. 

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