TiO2 is the world’s most common photocatalyst for cleaning water and air of organics, NOx and volatile compounds. It is universal, but it carries a systemic problem. The electron and hole excited by light recombine within nanoseconds, so most of the absorbed energy is lost as heat before it reaches a reaction at the surface. And free TiO2 powder shows peak activity precisely as a powder — a nanoparticle suspension in water, where every particle is exposed to light and solution on all sides. Once treatment is done, that powder has to be fished back out, or it becomes a pollutant in the effluent itself. The standard route is complicated and costly: immobilize the particles on a substrate (concrete, glass, ceramic) or add a membrane capture stage. Both cut specific surface area and activity against a free suspension.
The photocatalyst market is about $4 billion in 2026, reaching $10 billion by 2035 — and that excludes the separate cost of membrane capture and immobilization, without which classic industrial TiO2 deployment does not scale.
ARBOK does it more elegantly. TEGA — our graphene-like material with specific surface area up to 3,600 m2/g — holds TiO2 in its pores as finely distributed nanoparticles, not sintered powder. The conductive graphene matrix accepts the photoexcited electrons off the TiO2 surface, separating electron from hole and extending carrier lifetime — the same mechanism that, for graphene-TiO2 composites in the literature, delivers a 3–3.5x gain in photocatalytic activity over bare TiO2.
That same construction solves the second problem for free: TEGA is not a powder, it is a porous macroscopic graphene body. It does not pass through a reactor filter and does not turn into an effluent pollutant. The catalyst stays in place between cycles — no separate membrane capture stage needed.
Material economics: TEGA at $50/kg, photocatalytic-grade TiO2 at $25–30/kg. The feedstock stays cheap — the saving is not from swapping an expensive component for a cheap one; it comes from removing the capture infrastructure and from a catalyst service life several times longer.
In the United States, at North America’s 24% share of the global photocatalyst market, this is roughly $900 million in 2026, rising to roughly $2.4 billion by 2035. Globally, the photocatalyst market grows from $4 billion in 2026 to $10 billion by 2035.
The industry has spent decades treating recombination and catalyst loss as two separate problems. ARBOK solved both with one construction.