Study of Efficiency and Energy Consumption of Synthesized Nano-zno Sono-catalyst

In the present work, the activity of sono-catalytic synthetic nano-sized ZnO powder was studied via degradation of Direct Blue71 (DB71), an organic compound, as a case study. Nano-sized ZnO powder was synthesized without high-temperature activation then introduced to act as the sono-catalyst. Different characterization analyses were applied to demonstrate and confirm the structure of synthetic particles. Effects of six operational parameters such as initial solution pH (pH0), initial DB71 concentration (C0), additional dose of nano-sized ZnO powder (DSC), ultrasound irradiation frequency (FrSC), ultrasound irradiation power (PSC) and treatment time (tSC) were measured on the sono-catalysis color removal efficiency (CR%) and energy consumption per removal mass (EPM). Combination of full factorial for tSC and Taguchi for the other five parameters together with design of experiments (DOE) was done and experiments were conducted according to design. The experimental data collected in a laboratory scaled, handmade batch reactor equipped with ultrasonic bath cleaner. The measured CR% ranging from 0.03 to 100 and EPM from 0.19 to 1273 (wh/g) was gained under given conditions. The data was used for modeling using two more common models in this type of studies: reduced quadratic multiple regression model (RQRM) and artificial neural network (ANN). The most effective linear and quadratic parameters were founded from stepwise methodology for reduced quadratic multiple regression model. Multi-objective optimization of CR% and EPM was accomplished using genetic algorithm (GA) over the outperformed ANN models. The spectrophotometeric and TOC analysis were used to determine mineralization for an experiment run as instance.