Decontamination of Malachite green and Victoria blue-B dyes by high speed photo-catalyzer reactor using Titania and zinc oxide as catalysts

Detoxification of organic pollutant, especially dyes is a crucial step in wastewater treatment. It involves many strategies, which are time consuming and sometimes not very effective. Especially in photocatalytic degradation of dyes, continuous monitoring of dye contaminated sample is a rigorous job. So, in this work, an indigenous high speed reactor assembled with UV–visible spectrophotometer was used to photo-catalyzed decontamination of Malachite green and Victoria blue B dyes. This assembly is useful for continuous degradation of dyes and enables use for continuous monitoring with much ease. The design is so economical and flexible, that with little modifications in catalyst, one can easily apply that on larger scale wastewater treatment. Influence of various operating conditions, like: dye solution pH, oxidizing agent, dye concentration and catalyst dose of Titania and ZnO were studied. The kinetic data shows that degradation of Malachite green and Victoria blue B dyes followed pseudo first order kinetics with more than 98 % removal in 25 min. So, this setup can be adopted on larger scale dye removal from waste streams.