Novel catalytic ceramic membranes anchored with MnMe oxide and their catalytic ozonation performance towards atrazine degradation

In the present study, MnMe oxide (Me = Fe, Co, Ce) were in situ embedded on the surface and inside micropores of membranes by redox reaction to fabricate novel catalytic ceramic membranes. The synergistic effect of membrane filtration and catalytic ozonation were evaluated towards atrazine degradation. MnCe-CM owned the best performance with 99.99% atrazine removal in 40 min among four catalytic membranes because of the oxygen vacancies created by Ce3+/Ce4+ and Mn2+/Mn3+. MnCe-CM was subsequently chosen to explore the optimized operating conditions with a finding of ozone concentration 0.8 mg/min and pH 7. As the catalysts were successfully embedded on the surface and inside the micro-pores of MnCe-CM, the catalytic ozonation took place both on the surface and inside micropores. The reactions on the surface and inside micropores were proved very effective considering that the high specific surface provided sufficient reaction sites while the confined space facilitated the contact between •OH and the reactants. In addition, atrazine degradation pathways were proposed based on the identified byproducts. The reaction sites and the biotoxicity evaluation were calculated by density function theory (DFT) and Toxicity Estimation Software Tool (T.E.S.T), respectively. The present study provides a novel MnCe-CM with dual functions of filtration and catalytic ozonation and outlines the synergistic effect of separation and catalytic ozonation.