Abstract:
Nowadays, the presence of toxic dyes in industrial wastewater is of great concern as
they bring significant harm towards human health, aquatic lives and the environment
in general. Photoassisted catalytic decomposition of organic pollutants using
semiconductors as photocatalysts, has been a promising method for dyeing wastewater
treatment, due to its ability of not producing any secondary toxic materials. There are
several factors that can influence dye removal efficiency such as salinity,
photocatalyst loading, initial concentration of dye and light irradiation time.
Therefore, this study was conducted to evaluate the photocatalytic properties of ZnO
under various processing conditions, mainly in high salinity condition. The
degradation mechanism of methylene blue (MB) dye in high salinity condition by
ZnO photocatalyst was investigated. 7. 7 mg/L of MB dye solution was photodegraded
under illumination of UV light for up to 150 min in the presence of 1 g/L of ZnO. The
salinity of the solution was set at 64.7 g/L NaCl.
