Treatment of Pharmaceutical Wastewater Using Inexpensive Photocatalysts of Copper Oxide-Ion Exchanged Clinoptilolite Under Visible Light

In this study, ion-exchanged copper oxide-clinoptilolite photocatalysts with different weight percentages of copper oxide (from zero to 100%) were synthesized and investigated for the photocatalytic removal of tetracycline from wastewater. Characterization of samples photocatalysts by XRD, FESEM, EDX, UV-Vis DRS and BET/BJH analyzes showed that copper oxide was in the form of Cu2O in all samples and the addition of clinoptilolite decreased the size of copper oxide crystals from 50 to 37. Also, with increasing the amount of clinoptilolite, the degree of agglomoration of copper oxide decreases. While increasing the amount of clinoptilolite in the samples reduces the amount of light absorption, the bandgap energy becomes slightly larger, which reduces the possibility of recombination of charge carriers. The sample contains 50% by weight of copper oxide with a specific surface area of 116 m2/g has a suitable pore size for the entry and exit of tetracycline. This sample showed the highest amount of tetracycline photocatalytic removal (90.76%) in the initial concentration of tetracycline at 30 ppm, the amount of photocatalyst at 1 g/l and pH=7.