Abstract

Treatment of Textile Dye Wastewater using Photocatalytic Reactor

Author(s): P. Santhosh, R. S. Ram Kumar and K. M. Gopalakrishnan

This work was planned to investigate experimentally the removal of organic compounds from textile industrial wastewater by immobilized photocatalytic treatment, for its reuse in the same industry or for domestic purpose and irrigation. Now a days immobilized photocatalytic technique is used for the treatment of textile wastewater. Due to high photocatalytic activity and stability of titanium dioxide, it is generally used as a photocatalyst for the removal of organic compound. TiO2 was immobilized by dipcoating technique. When dip-coating technique is applied, the operating region shifted from UV to visible. Sol-gel technique has been taken as one of the adaptable methods for the preparation of metal dipped nanocrystaline TiO2. In this technique, the wavelength of the UV light and the amount of immobilized TiO2 were negligible. Photocatalytic oxidation of the combined UV/TiO2 catalyst excites the particles from the valance band to the conduction band having a forbidden energy zone value of 3.3 eV. The free hydroxyl radicals produced due to this excitation removes the organic compounds present in the dye wastewater by degradation. In the present work, we investigate in the operating conditions of catalyst concentration 100 mg/L, pH of 7 and at room temperature. Under these conditions, the degradation of about 80.5% of Congo red dye and 77.4% of T.blue SBL dye were achievable in 480 mins.