Solar light-induced degradation of ethyl paraben with CuOx/BiVO4: Statistical evaluation of operating factors and transformation by-products

Abstract

In this work, the solar light-induced photocatalytic degradation of ethyl paraben (EP) was studied using CuOx/BiVO4 with 0.75wt.% copper loading, a relatively new photocatalyst that can exploit a large portion of the solar spectrum. The synthesized catalyst had a primary crystallite size of ca 37nm, a specific surface area of 1m2/g and a direct bandgap of 2.3eV. A factorial design methodology was implemented to evaluate the importance of EP concentration (500–1500μg/L), catalyst concentration (100–500mg/L), reaction time (10–60min), the presence of radical scavengers (pure water or 500mg/L bicarbonates) and initial solution pH (3–9) on EP removal. All individual effects were statistically significant and so was the second-order interaction of EP concentration with reaction time. Interestingly and differently from the majority of photocatalytic studies, the presence of bicarbonates promotes the photocatalytic degradation of ethyl paraben. The photocatalytic activity drops from 98% to 79% after five consecutive runs, possibly due to accumulation of oxidation by-products. Liquid chromatography-time of flight mass spectrometry (LC-TOF-MS) revealed that EP degradation occurs mainly via dealkylation followed by hydroxylation reactions and the formation of methyl paraben, 4-hydroxybenzoic acid, 2,4-dihydroxybenzoic acid and 3,4-dihydroxybenzoic acid as primary transformation by-products.