Removal of xylene vapor pollutant from the air using new hybrid substrates of TiO2-WO3 nanoparticles immobilized on the ZSM-5 zeolite under UV radiation at ambient temperature: Experimental towards modeling

Abstract

Xylene is one of the volatile organic compounds (VOCs) produced at industrial scale with destructive effects on human beings and the ecosystem; then, its removal is essential. To do so, new ZSM-5/TiO2-WO3 photocatalysts into the different amount of WO3 were prepared by immobilizing the TiO2-WO3 nanoparticles on the ZSM-5 zeolite. The results disclosed that the ZSM-5/TiO2-WO3 photocatalysts show a better photocatalytic decomposition of xylene compared with ZSM-5/TiO2 (without WO3). The breakthrough results revealed that ZSM-5/TiO2-WO3 3 wt% has a higher adsorption capacity and longer time rather than those of 1 wt% and 5 wt%. In order to evaluate the effect of important parameters, for example, xylene concentration (Cxylene/ppm), xylene flow rate (Qxylene/L. min−1) and catalyst concentration (Ccat/wt%) simultaneously on the photocatalytic removal efficiency (RE/%) and find their significance and optimum conditions, the experiments were designed based on Taguchi L18 orthogonal array method known as a robust design method. The analysis of variance (ANOVA) results revealed that Cxylene is the most significant parameter affecting RE. At the optimum conditions, the ZSM-5/TiO2-WO3 (3 wt%) exhibited the best performance to remove about 47.80% xylene. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first study on the preparation of the new ZSM-5/TiO2-WO3 photocatalyst for xylene removal and investigating the effect of the aforementioned parameters simultaneously on the RE using Taguchi method.