Study on removal of phenol from synthetic wastewater using solar photo catalytic reactor

Abstract

The present study is devoted to investigate the removal of phenol, which has been selected as a model for the toxic organic compounds by using a parabolic trough collector (PTC) photo catalysis system. The solar photo-catalytic system performance was tested in terms of the phenol removal (%Rphenol) and TOC mineralization efficiency (%MTOC) by using FeSO4 as a catalyst and Oxalic acid as a solar photo assisted agent to enhance the process efficiency. Different operating conditions were studied to investigate the performance of the photo-catalysis system, such as initial phenol concentration, initial H2O2 concentration, FeSO4/Oxalic weigh ratio, pH of solution, and solution flow rate. The operating variables were optimized to obtain a maximum efficiency for the system performance. Results showed that optimum addition of ferrioxalate complexes (3 mg/L) enhanced the degradation of phenol by (20–30%) at 120 min of illumination time. A quadratic-second-degree polynomial equation was developed for (%Rphenol) and (%MTOC) with correlation coefficients (R2) of 95.26% and 95.2%, respectively. Keywords: Photo catalysis, Phenol removal, Wastewater treatment