Abstract:
Along with industrialization, most of the water resources get contaminated and
the increased levels of pollutants present in water affect the water quality and
aquatic life. While the textile industry contributes largely to the world's
economy, it releases huge quantities of dyes and pigments to the environment.
Fenton oxidation process is one of the advanced oxidation processes that
shows remarkable and promising results in the field of wastewater treatment.
However, the homogeneous Fenton process has several disadvantages
including production of large volumes of sludge. The main objective of the
current research is to develop an efficient, cost-effective and reusable zeolite
based heterogeneous Fenton catalyst to treat wastewater containing Reactive
Black 5 (RB5) dye. Zeolite was synthesized from ball clay using hydrothermal
process. Synthesized zeolite was characterized by FT-IR, XRD and SEM
analysis. Heterogeneous Fenton catalyst (Fe3O4/Zeolite) was prepared by
impregnating Fe(II) into the zeolite and subsequently characterized using FTIR,
XRD and SEM spectroscopy. Iron loading percentage of 0.875% on zeolite
was achieved in the catalytic preparation. The catalyst successfully removed
of RB5 in waster and the optimum heterogeneous Fenton reaction conditions
for the decolorization of 100 ppm RB5 were determined as catalytic dosage of
0.05 g, [H2O2] of 4 mM, pH of 3 and reaction time of 25 minutes at 600 rpm
at 30 ºC. Under these optimum reaction conditions, 97% decolorization
efficiency was achieved. Reusability studies showed higher decolorization
efficiencies even after 5 cycles. Results of the current study will be useful to
design new textile wastewater treatment systems.
