Study of the Influence of Clay in the Degradation of Methylene Blue by Photo-Fenton Process

Industrial effluents from textile, tannery or printing activities often have a significant pollutant load composed of dyes that are difficult to biodegrade. These dyes pose a threat to the environment. To overcome this problem, various processes have been developed to eliminate these dyes in wastewater before their release into nature. Conventional biological or physical processes most often prove to be ineffective and expensive. It is therefore necessary to resort to other processes such as advanced oxidation processes (POA). This work therefore focuses on the study of the influence of clay in the degradation of Methylene Blue by the photo-Fenton process which is one of the advanced oxidation processes (POA), with the source of irradiation, natural light. To do this, two clays from Ivory Coast referenced AB and Aga were the subject of a physicochemical and mineralogical characterization. The results showed that Aga clay is composed of 77.13% quartz, 12.72% kaolinite, 8.75% illite and 3.12% goethite and AB clay consists of 61, 31% kaolinite, 28.9% quartz and 11.26% illite. Under natural light irradiation the optimal amounts of Fenton reagents (iron: 10 mg; H2O2: 0.1mL) were determined. Finally, the addition of clay to the photo-Fenton process made it possible to improve the degradation of the pollutant (Methylene Blue). Indeed, the yield increased from 92% for the photo-Fenton process to 98.43% with the addition of AB clay and 98.13% for the addition of Aga clay. The results of the degradation kinetics clearly show that the degradation follows the pseudo-second order kinetics with correlation coefficients greater than 0.99.