Preparation and characterization of TiO2incorporated 13X molecular sieves forphotocatalytic removal of acetaminophen fromaqueous solutions

Abstract

Although stabilizing of nano-particles on porous media is a suitable methods in harness-ing the agglomeration and inactivation of nano-particles, but still release of particles to theenvironment remains the most serious challenges facing toward photocatalysis process.Attachment of nanoparticles through ion exchange may be a promising method to solvingthese defects. In this study TiO2was incorporated into the 13X molecular sieves by addi-tion of the titanyl ion through an ion-exchange of ammonium-titanyl-oxalate as well as thedecomposition of titanyl oxalate salt, which remained on the zeolite through the impreg-nation and calcination process. A part of TiO2on the zeolite was also bound through aTi O Si bond. The investigation of TiO2-HX catalytic potential showed that neutral pH and500 mg/L catalyst were the optimal conditions for acetaminophen removal (1 mg/L) in theUV/TiO2-HX process. The maximum removal efficiency of 95.45% ± 0.8 was attained after75 min contact time. The acetaminophen degradation during the UV/TiO2-HX process wasfollowed a pseudo first order kinetic model with rate constants (Kapp) of 0.8676 h−1. Under theoptimum conditions, maximum synergistic efficiency of 60.07% was acquired. The exper-imental data showed that the UV/TiO2-HX process is effective in acetaminophen removalfrom aqueous solutions