Synthesis and characterisation of zinc oxide-chromium oxide for optimisation of photocatalytic/H2O2 process by response surface methodology: selective and regeneration studies

The scope of this project was to synthesis a ZnO-Cr2O3 for selective imatinib removal. Molecular imprinting was used to prepare polymerisation using ZnO-Cr2O3 with tetraethyl orthosilicate and 3-ammonia propyl triethoxysilane as the cross-linker and recognition sites for removal of imatinib compound. The ZnO-Cr2O3/MIP powders were characterised by field emission scanning electron microscopy (FE-SEM), X-ray diffraction, N2 adsorption-desorption, thermogravimetric analysis and dynamic light scattering. The average crystallite sizes of ZnO-Cr2O3 and ZnO-Cr2O3/MIP were 40.87 and 55.45 nm, respectively. The Box-Behnken design method was used for Experiments optimisation using response surface methodology (RSM). Several factors like ZnO-Cr2O3/MIP concentration, H2O2 concentration, and initial pH on the optimisation of imatinib photo-degradation were evaluated with the polynomial regression method. At optimum process factors (ZnO-Cr2O3/MIP: 1.0 g/L, H2O2: 50 mg/L, and pH: 7), the imatinib photo-degradation was achieved 94.41% during 40 min as process time. The photo-degradation analysed for several decomposition processes like UV, H2O2 and UV/H2O2/ZnO-Cr2O3/MIP was carried out at the optimum factors. The ZnO-Cr2O3/MIP has high degradation turnover and selectivity, depicting the efficiency for removal of selective imatinib.