Performance Studies of TiO2 Catalyst for Phenol Degradation

Water is a valuable source that directly impact human life. The expansions of globalization as well industrialization led to water pollution, thus became worsen over the time. The issue of degradation of organic and inorganic pollutants become very serious from ecological point of view, especially organic pollutants in industrial effluents due to difficult to be remove by means of conventional technologies. Phenol compound in wastewater effluents can threatens the human and public health, water supplies, and has negative impacts on the ecosystems. In addition, the TiO2 semiconductor metal oxide provides a great interest among researchers to overcome this problem via photocatalytic reaction under advanced oxidation processes (AOPs). The AOPs mainly used the hydroxyl radicals to attack and destroy a wide range of harmful dyes into non-toxic products, CO2 and water at ambient temperature. Therefore, in this study, the synthesized TiO2 catalyst gave the remarkable degradation of phenol up to 96.3%, meanwhile the commercial TiO2 only show 80.3%, in respectively under similar optimum conditions of 10 mg/L at pH 5 with dosage of 1.25 g/L within 90 mins time reaction under light irradiation.