Study of the sonophotocatalytic degradation of basic blue 9 industrial textile dye over slurry titanium dioxide and influencing factors

The sonophotocatalytic degradation of basic blue 9 industrial textile dye has been studied in the presence of ultrasound (20 kHz) over a TiO2 slurry employing an UV lamp (15 W, 352 nm). It was observed that the color removal efficiency was influenced by the pH of the solution, initial dye concentration and TiO2 amount. It was found that the dye degradation followed apparent first order kinetics. The rate constant increased by decreasing dye concentration and was affected by the pH of the solution with the highest degradation obtained at pH 7. The first order rate constants obtained with sonophotocatalysis were twofold and tenfold than those obtained under photocatalysis and sonolysis, respectively. The chemical oxygen demand was abated over 80%.