Comparison between the performance of an immobilized impinging jet stream reactor and a slurry impinging jet stream reactor for photocatalytic phenol degradation

Abstract

A new immobilized photocatalytic impinging jet stream reactor was designed, and the influences of the effective parameters like jet flow rate, TiO₂ coating disc diameter, nozzle-to-disc distance, and initial concentration on phenol removal were investigated. The reactor was also used as a slurry reactor, and degradation efficiencies in both reactors were compared based on their catalyst loading. The results indicated that the slurry reactor has a higher degradation efficiency than the immobilized reactor at the same TiO₂ loading and other operational conditions. The slurry reactor needs to separate and recover the TiO₂ nanoparticles from the reaction medium which increases the overall process complexity and cost, while the immobilized reactor could be reused at least 4times without any significant decrease in removal efficiency. RTD result indicates that the tank in series model (N = 5) could properly predict the reactors hydrodynamic behavior.

Graphical Abstract

Keywords:

• Immobilized impinging jet stream reactor
• Photocatalytic degradation
• Residence time distribution
• Slurry impinging jet stream reactor
• Tank in series model

Acknowledgments

The authors would like to honor the memory of Prof. Morteza Sohrabi, who passed away unexpectedly during this research project.