Removal of Methyl Violet Dye from Synthetic Wastewater Using a Hybrid Detoxification Process

The aim of the present study was to design a solar reactor and analyze its performance for removal of methyl violet dye (MV) from water with titanium dioxide as the photocatalyst. The solar reactor was made up of a flat-plate colorless glass of dimensions 1000 x 750 x 4 mm. The base of the reactor was made of aluminum. Various operating parameters were studied to investigate the behavior of the designed reactor like initial dye concentration (CMV=10-50 mg/L), loading of catalyst (CTiO2=200-800 mg/L), suspension flow rate (QL=0.3-2 L/min), pH of suspension (5-10), and H2O2 concentration (CH2O2=200-1000 mg/L). The operating parameters were optimized to give higher efficiency to the reactor performance. The designed reactor when operating at optimum conditions offered a degradation of MV up to 95.27% within one hours of operation time, while a conversion of 99.95% was obtained in three hours. The effluent from the photocatalytic reactor was fed to a LPRO separation system which produced a permeat of turbidity value of 0.09NTU. The product water was analyized using UVspectrophotometer and FTIR. The analysis results confirmed that the water from the Hybrid-system could be safely recycled and reuse. It was found that the kinetics of dye degradation was first order with respect to dye concentration and could be well described by Langmuir-Hinshelwood model.