The Photocatalytic Oxidation Properties of La³⁺-Doped and Ce⁴⁺-Doped ZnO-TiO₂ in Treating Pharmaceutical Wastewater

• DOI: 10.4028/www.scientific.net/amr.726-731.2988
• Publication Date: 2013-08-16T07:48:58Z
• Authors: Lei Zhu; Yang Fan Xiao; Xun Wang
• Keywords: 01 natural sciences; 6. Clean water; 0104 chemical sciences

This experiment aims to prepare the Zn2 +-doped TiO2 composite semiconductor materials by the sol-gel method and to characterize their crystal structures by X-ray diffraction and electron microscopy (SEM) scanning. The degradation target in this experiment is the pharmaceutical wastewater of a certain Chinese patent medicine, whose COD is as high as 300,000 mg/L and chroma is above 500 degrees. When the doping ratio of ZnO is 8%, the pharmaceutical wastewaters COD and chroma removal rates for 2hs degradation respectively reach 72.5% and 33.8%. The doping of Ce4+ or La3+ can improve the catalytic activity of ZnO-TiO2. The cerium doped in can improve ZnO-TiO2s catalytic property within 7%, and when the doping ratio of lanthanum is 0.4%, the chroma removal rate of the pharmaceutical wastewater reaches 65%, 31.2% more than that of the pure ZnO-TiO2.