| Summary: | Hydrogels have excellent properties that make them ideally suited as host matrices for the immobilization of photoreactive materials such as TiO<sub>2</sub> nanoparticles that serve as catalysts in the photodegradation of organic dyes, which is of great importance in practical water pollution treatment applications. However, the application of hydrogels for this purpose remains poorly studied. The present study addresses this issue by developing two types of hydrogels based on poly(methyl acrylate) and succinamide acid with embedded TiO<sub>2</sub> nanoparticles for use as photocatalysts in the photodegradation of organic dyes. The results of the analysis demonstrate that the TiO<sub>2</sub> nanoparticles are distributed uniformly in the hydrogel matrices, and the hydrogels maintain their original structures after use. The photodegradation efficiencies of the developed TiO<sub>2</sub>-hydrogels are demonstrated to be reasonably close to that of freely distributed TiO<sub>2</sub> nanoparticles in solution for four different organic dyes. In addition, the results of degradation-regeneration cycling tests demonstrate that immobilizing the TiO<sub>2</sub> nanoparticles into the hydrogels greatly reduces their loss during utilization, and the photocatalysts can be easily reused. In fact, the two TiO<sub>2</sub>-hydrogels retain reasonably high photocatalytic degradation performance after four degradation-regeneration cycles.
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