Photocatalytic Degradation of Antibiotics and Dyes in Wastewater by Hydrogenated Black Titanium Dioxide

Nanoparticles Using Design of Experiment L9 Taguchi Orthogonal Array

Aqueous pollution from industrial dyes and antibiotics has brought up much threat to our daily healthy life. In the present work, hydrogenated black TiO 2 nanoparticles (H-TiO 2 ) are synthetized, their properties are studied, and their potentials in removing dyes (methylene blue, M.B.) and antibiotics such as tetracycline hydrochloride (TC) and ciprofloxacin (CIP) are explored with the support of statistical optimization. The opera-tional controlled parameters such as catalyst amount (g L −1 ), pH and irradiation time (min) were optimized using Design of Experiment (DOE) L9 Taguchi Orthogonal Array. From Analysis of Variance (ANOVA) results, it can be seen that irradiation time is the most influencing parameter for % MB color removal, % Degradation of TC and CIP, over catalyst amount and pH. The optimal parameters found here are 0.50 g L −1 of hydrogenated H-TiO 2 -750 as catalyst, pH 4 for MB, pH 11 for TC and pH 2 for CIP, respectively. In addition, an irradiation time of 30 min shows a maximum MB color removal of 95.05%, TC 94.8% and CIP 92.25%. Irradiation time is found to be the most influencing parameter (71.08% for MB, 55.33% for TC and 52.77% for CIP) followed by catalyst amount (28.82% for MB, 44.19% for TC and 41.5% for CIP) and in the end pH (0.09% for MB, 0.47% for TC and 5.72% for CIP). With the use of hydrogenated H-TiO 2 -750, the dye and antibiotics degradation reaches almost 40% more than using TiO 2 anatase.