Use of Zinc Oxide Nanoparticle for the Removal of Phenol Contaminated Water

Abstract

A variety of synthetic organic water pollutants are classified as refractory (or biorefractory) when they're poorly biodegraded. Phenol is one of those organic pollutants that may causes contamination of water and can cause significant problems if present in domestic water supplies. Conventional processes for removing phenol from industrial effluent include extraction, adsorption on activated carbon, steam distillation, bacterial and chemical techniques. Many of these methods suffering from high cost, incompleteness of purification, formation of dangerous by-products, or low efficiency especially when the contaminant present in diluted concentration. This study aims to examine phenol removal efficiency of Zinc Oxide nanoprticles from water containing trace amount of phenol as a modelled organic pollutant. The effect of dose on the removal efficiency was also studied. To perform the objective, a low temperature chemical growth was used to synthesize zinc oxide nanostructures using coprecipitation standard method. Laboratory based experiment model was designed in which deionized water containing a 2 ppm concentration of phenol was contacted with seven different doses of ZnO nanpaticles in powder form for two hours contact time. The final phenol concentrations were evaluated and ZnO degradation efficiency was calculated. Synthesized ZnO nanoparticles were examined using XRD and SEM tests. The photocatalytic degradation of phenol showed high efficiency in the removal of phenol as a modelled refractory organic pollutant.

Selective Detection and Removal of Zinc Oxide Nanoparticles in Contaminated Water

“…323 Photocatalytic applications on wastewater organic pollutant degradation also have received substantial attention in recent years. 324,325 Next, the effect of methanol solvent (which helped dissolve BPA) was studied by testing a mixture of methanol and KCl. Figure 5.4d confirms that methanol did not produce other current peaks than the reduction peak at -0.7 V. Addition of BPA produces an irreversible oxidation peak at +0.3 V that is also observed slightly with phenol as shown in The mechanism of current magnification was thus confirmed (rather than just a simple phenol preconcentration effect), to require complete drying in order to form a conductive coating of ZnO nanoparticles on the SPE, where similar reduction peak magnification with ZnO was observed by Li et al (2017).…”