Preparation and Characterization of ZnO-Zeolite Nanocomposite for Photocatalytic Degradation by Ultraviolet Light

The increasing growth of the textile industry does not only provide benefits in the economic sector but also has the potential to damage the environment, because it generates the dye wastewater which is hard to eliminate. Procion red is one of the synthetic textile dyes that is toxic to the aquatic environment and it needs to be processed properly. The photocatalytic method of processing dye wastewater is the most effective, because it can remove the harmful pollutants in the dye wastewater. This study aimed to prepare and characterize the ZnO-Zeolite nanocomposites for photocatalytic applications tested with a 50 mg/L procion red dye sample. The nanocomposites consisted of the ZnO semiconductors and synthetic zeolite adsorbents prepared by using the sol-gel method. The dye degradation test was carried out under the irradiation conditions with ultraviolet (UV) lamp. Apart from the ZnO-Zeolite nanocomposite, testing was also carried out with the synthetic zeolite and ZnO. The results of SEM-EDX and XRD characterization proved that the nanocomposite forming components were ZnO and zeolite and could be seen from the resulting peaks. BET showed that the surface area value of the ZnO-Zeolite nanocomposite increased to 95.98 m(2)/g, the pore size of the ZnO-Zeolite nanocomposite was 4.42 nm, and the total pore volume was 0.08 cm(3)/g. The obtained average crystalline size of ZnO-Zeolite nanocomposite was 32.87 nm. The percentage of dye degradation using the ZnO-Zeolite nanocomposite for 120 minutes has reached 90.42%.