Photocatalytic hydrogen production using bench-scale trapezoidal photocatalytic reactor

Abstract

Hydrogen is the future fuel and energy carrier, which has numerous applications. During combustion, produces only water vapour instead of greenhouse gas emissions. Photocatalytic production of hydrogen as a clean fuel from sulphide wastewater arises as a necessary option that must be considered. Here we report the performance of CNT added CdZnS/Fe2O3 for hydrogen recovery from highly toxic sulphide containing wastewater. The prepared photocatalysts were characterised for XRD (structure), UV-DRS (band gap), HRTEM (particle size), XPS (binding energy), SEM (morphology) and ICP (elemental composition). The photocatalytic hydrogen recovery was performed using novel trapezoidal photocatalytic reactor. The synthesized novel CNT - CdZnS/Fe2O3 nano-photocatalyst has highest production of hydrogen (2679 μmol/h) than plain CdZnS/Fe2O3 (2009 μmol/h).The feasibility studies were conducted to optimize the operating variables viz., S2- (sulphide ion) concentrations, SO32- (sulphite ion) concentrations, catalyst amount, light irradiation and volume of wastewater. Reusability studies under natural solar irradiation were performed and the CNT deposited CdZnS/Fe2O3 photocatalyst was found to be stable upto seven runs.