The photocatalytic wastewater treatment facility presented in this thesis is a promising economic green technology that can degrade wastewater’s organic and ammonia pollutants, which produce environmentally sensitive products like CO2, H2O, Nitrates, etc. that can be captured and used in many biological and engineering ways. Previous advances used for this research was determining the importance of cleaning the photocatalytic nanocrystals, Fe-TiO2, as one of the revolutionary improvements that expose and maximizes the active surface of the photocatalytic nanocrystals to the pollutants enabling the strong oxidants produced by the absorption of a photon, excitation of an electron and positive hole to produce oxidants on the surface of the nanocrystals. The oxidants indiscriminately produce CO2 and H2O from living and non-living organic matter to obtain near ~100% clean water. This research focused on taking the next steps in the development of a wastewater cleaning facility tested in our laboratory. An important step involved coating Fe-TiO2 crystals onto flexible, strong, fiber-glass cloth using a sol-gel processing method. Success was found in this research by applying the coated fiberglass cloth into a photoreactor aimed to clean a large amount of water rather than the laboratory scale. / Graduate

A bench-scale tubular reactor with recirculation was built in order to study the efficiency of the photocatalytic oxidation of phenol on fluidized titanium oxide-coated silica gel beads. A UV-C lamp placed along the central vertical axes of the reactor was used as source of photons. A bed of silica gel beads was fluidized by means of fluid recirculation and forced to follow upward helical flow around the lamp. Anatase was successfully synthetized on silica gel particles of average diameters 224, 357 and 461 µm, as confirmed by scanning electron micrographs, through a sol-gel technique using a titanium (iv)isopropoxide / hydrochloric acid / ethanol precursor. Data was obtained from multiple 8-hours photocatalytic experiments using a determined mass of beads fluidized in an aqueous solution of known initial phenol concentration. Contaminant degradation with irradiation time was measured as COD. Beads that had been subjected to three consecutive coating procedures produced an 8-h removal efficiency 10% higher than beads with a single coat. 20 g L-1 of silica beads was found to be the optimum load for the experimental reactor configuration regardless of beads size, although efficiency increased with decreasing size of the latter. Experimental results confirmed that the efficiency of phenol photocatalytic degradation decreases with increasing pollutant concentration. Also, the highest removal was achieved with initial pH 3, and it decreased with increasing pH. When NaCl was added to the solution, COD removal increased with increasing salinity. Additionally, it was found that dissolved oxygen is indispensable for photocatalysis to proceed, and that saturation of the treated mixture with oxygen was effectively achieved by keeping the liquid surface in contact with pure oxygen at 1 atm. Finally, statistical analysis of the data showed that photocatalytic mineralization of phenol-derived COD under the experimental conditions follows exponential decay. Based on this finding, a correlation model was proposed for the accurate prediction (minimum R2 = 0.9840) of the COD removal efficiency of the reactor for any given initial COD.