Development of a Novel Ozone Catalytic Oxidation-based Dyeing Wastewater Treatment Technology

Considerable amount of dyeing wastewater was released from dyeing industries each year, which has caused serious environmental issues including hazardous gas emissions (VOCs, NOx, SOx) and disruption of biological balance in water bodies. Therefore, it is necessary to remove dyes from dyeing wastewater for sustainable environmental development. Presently various methods have been developed for dye removal, which can be classified into three categories: physical, chemical, and biological treating processes. Among them, adsorption and catalytic oxidation are the most commonly used technologies. However, their performances are unsatisfactory because of current adsorbents’ small pore size, additional waste disposal and adsorbent regeneration problems for adsorption technology, as well as low activity of available catalysts for catalytic oxidation technology. Recently, it has been shown that ozone catalytic oxidation (OCO) is one of the ideal technologies for dye removal. The addition of ozone can boost dye oxidation rate and removal efficiency. Although promising, the performance of OCO technology still needs to be improved for widespread application. In this project, we propose a novel high efficient OCO dye removal technology with nanocatalyst/carbon aerogel composite (CAC) materials. Carbon aerogel possesses large mesopore volume and surface area, which benefits catalyst deposition and enhancement of dye transport and adsorption. All of these could greatly increase the oxidation rate of dyes and thereby the removal efficiency. To realize this technology, we will first develop a highly active and stable nanocatalyst/CAC material using the proposed cost effective method. By utilizing these materials, an OCO reactor will also be designed and fabricated, with which series of experiments is performed in order to optimize the operating conditions and reactor design, such that a cost effective OCO system with high removal efficiency is developed for the dying wastewater treatment.