Discoloration on Methylene Blue Solutions by Direct and Catalytic Ozonation

Abstract

During textile manufacturing, huge amounts of wastewaters characterized by removed impurities and high concentrations of dye are produced. These wastewaters cause several problems when they are discharged to the environment. The use of ozone in wastewater treatment results of interest. In this work we propose to assess the discoloration rate of different synthetic wastewaters as a function of pH, dye concentration (methylene blue (MB)) and reaction time. A comparison of discoloration rate between conventional ozonation and catalytic ozonation salts of copper, zinc, silver and nickel was also performed. For the optimization of the ozonation process of colored solutions, it was used a central composite experimental design with five replicates of the center point resulting to evaluate the influence of the independent variables at different ranges of pH, [MB] and time. In the catalyst-assisted ozonation, [MB], pH and the reaction time were fixed to 100 mg/L, 5.5 and 15 min, respectively. The optimized experimental conditions to provide maximum discoloration were pH = 3.3; [MB] = 8.6 mg/L and time = 74.3 min. Regarding the catalyst-assisted ozonation, it was found that CuSO4 catalyst gave better color reduction if compared with other catalysts assayed.