Preparation and characterization of ZnO/MMT nanocomposite for photocatalyticozonation of a disperse dye

Abstract

ZnO was immobilized on the montmorillonite (MMT) to synthesize ZnO/MMT nanocomposite. Physic-ochemical properties of the as-synthesized nanocomposite were determined using X-ray diffraction, scanning electronmicroscopy, transmission electron microscope, Fourier transform infrared spectroscopy, N2adsorption/desorption, andpoint of zero charge pH (pHpzc) analysis. The performance of the prepared ZnO/MMT nanocomposite was examinedfor the photocatalytic ozonation of Disperse Red 54 (DR54) and the highest decolorization efficiency (88.75% after60 min of reaction time) was the result for the mentioned process compared to adsorption, single ozonation, catalyticozonation, and photolysis. The in uence of various operational parameters including initial dye concentration, catalystconcentration, pH value, inlet gas concentration, and type of irradiation source was investigated on the efficiency of thephotocatalytic ozonation removal of DR54. Various inorganic and organic reactive oxygen species (ROS) scavengers wereapplied to investigate the mechanism of photocatalytic ozonation. In addition, a three-layer perceptron neural networkwas developed for modeling the relationship between the operational parameters and decolorization efficiency of the dye.High R2values were obtained for both the training and test data.