investigation of the catalytic ozonation performance using copper coated zeolite in the removal of reactive red 198 from aqueous solutions

introduction: dye removal from industrial wastewater has been considered as one of the most environmental issues. recently, new methods of treatment such as catalytic ozonation have been used to increase dye removal efficiency. so, the efficiency of catalytic ozonation by copper coated zeolite as a catalyst in the removal of reactive red 198 was investigated. materials & methods: in order to remove dye, the zeolite granules were modified by cuso4. the heterogenous catalytic ozona-tion experiments were carried out to deter-mine the effect of ph, contact time, initial dye concentration, catalyst dose and radical scavengering in a semi-batch reactor. sca-nning electron microscope (sem), x-ray diffraction (xrd), x-ray fluorescence (xrf), adsorption/desorption porosimetry (bet) analyses were used to determine the structural properties, chemical compounds, specific surface area and morphological characteristic of zeolite and copper coated zeolite. also catalytic ozonation process (cop) removal in both catalytic and sole ozonation was measured. findings: the results showed that in cat-alytic ozonation, the removal efficiency of the dye increased in proportion to the increasing of ph, contact time, catalyst dose. conversely, with the increasing of the initial concentrations of dye from 100 to 500 mg/l, removal efficiency decreased from 92% to 68% in catalytic ozonation. furthermore, in the presence of radical scavenger, no considerable decrease was observed in catalytic ozonation. also cod experiments showed 20% and 45% incr-eases in the sole ozonation and catalytic ozonation, respectively. discussion & conclusion: due to the low cost, availability and high performance of zeolite as a catalyst support, and also with regard to the advantages of heterogenous systems compared with homogenous sys-tem, using of copper coated zeolite in cata-lytic ozonation processes for the removal of different pollutants is suggested.