Experimental study on oxidative decomposition of nitrobenzene in aqueous solution by honeycomb ceramic-catalyzed ozonation

The ozonation of nitrobenzene in aqueous solution was carried out in a semi-batch reactor to investigate the degradation efficiency, the effect factors, and the reaction mechanism, where honeycomb ceramic was used as a catalyst. The presence of honeycomb ceramic could improve the degradation rate of nitrobenzene by 15.46% compared to the results of ozonation alone. Under the conditions of this experiment, the degradation rate of honeycomb ceramic-catalyzed ozonation increased by 12.94% with the increase of the amount of catalyst from 1 to 5 blocks. The degradation rates all increased greatly with the increase of temperature and pH of the solution in the processes of honeycomb ceramiccatalyzed ozonation and ozonation alone. But, when the pH of the solution increased to 9.50, the advantage of the honeycomb ceramic-catalyzed ozonation process would be lost. The experimental findings indicated that in the processes of ozonation alone and honeycomb ceramic-catalyzed ozonation, nitrobenzene was primarily oxidized by •OH free radical in aqueous solution. The adsorption of nitrobenzene was too limited to have an important influence on the degradation rate of nitrobenzene. With the same total dosage of applied ozone, the multiple step addition of ozone showed much higher removal efficiency than that obtained by one step in the two processes.