Photocatalytic degradation of phenolic effluents in petroleum refineries

. Petroleum refinery effluents such as phenol are very toxic and impose a serious ecological issues. The employment of UV/ZnO NRs system for the degradation of phenol in aqueous solution has been investigated in the present study. The ZnO NRs were synthesized by hydrothermal growth method and characterized spectroscopically exploiting SEM and UV-VIS. It was noticed that the degradation of phenol depends on several operational parameters such as the initial concentration (5ppm, 10 ppm or 20 ppm), the irradiation time (between 0 and 10 hours), and the UV light energy (365 nm or 254 nm). The photocatalytic degradation rates of phenol was observed to follow the pseudo first order kinetics according to the Langmuir-Hinshelwood model. An efficient degradation of about 90 % was registered under 254 nm for an irradiation time of 10 hours.