Treatment Efficiency of UV/H2O2 Process on Simulated Textile Industry Wastewater by using Box-Behnken Design (BBD) Coupled with Response Surface Methodology (RSM)

The present study involves the performance evaluation of UV/H2O2 process on a simulated dye bath effluent by studying the effects of initial H2O2 concentration, changing the pollution load and initial pH. The process was optimized by four factors and three levels of Box-Behnken design (BBD) coupled with response surface methodology (RSM). During the experiment colour removal and degradation studies were also performed to ensure the treatment efficiency. The results obtained show that the colour removal efficiency can be achieved within a short time due to the degradation of the structure which is more susceptible to oxidation that undergoes faster degradation. Then slower and gradual degradation of the simple and conjugated aromatic compounds takes place. In the first 5 minutes of the irradiation of the dyes, the pH value is decreased from 11 to 9.5 and for another pH value decreased from 9 to 7.01. The drop in the pH value is mainly due to the formation of organic as well as inorganic acid as a degradation product. Under the optimum operating conditions such as pollution load of 64 %, initial concentration of H2O2 0.6 M, initial pH value of 8 and treatment time of 81 min shows the predicted removal efficiencies are 98.77 % and 86.11 % for Colour removal and COD removal, respectively, which were closer to the experimental values are 98.11 % and 85.26 % for Colour removal and COD removal respectively.