Investigating the effect of gas flow rate, inlet ozone concentration and relative humidity on the efficacy of catalytic ozonation process in the removal of xylene from waste airstream

Background and aimsThe catalytic ozonation is an efficient process for the degradation of volatile organic compounds from contaminated air stream. This study was aimed at investigating the efficacy of catalytic ozonation process in removal of xylene from the polluted air stream and the influence of retention time (gas flow rate), inlet ozone dose and relative humidity on this performanceMethodsthe catalytic ozonation of xylene was conducted using a bench scale set-up consisted of a syringe pump,an air pump, an ozone generator, and a glass reactor packed with activated carbon. Several experimental run was defined to investigate the influence of the selectedoperational variables.ResultsThe results indicated that the efficiency of catalytic ozonation was greater than that of single adsorption in removal of xylene under similar inlet concentration and relative humidity. We found a significant catalytic effect for activated carbon when used in combination with ozonation process, leading to improvement of xylene removal percentage. In addition, the elimination capacity of the system improved with the increase of inlet ozone dose as well as gas flow rate. The relative humidity showed a positive effect of the xylene removal at the range of 5 to 50%, while the higher humidity (more than 50%) resulted in reduction of the performance.ConclusionThe findings of the present work revealed that the catalytic ozonation process can be an efficient technique for treating the air streams containing industrial concentrations of xylene. Furthermore, there is a practical potential to retrofit the present adsorption systems intothe catalytic ozonation simply by coupling them with the ozonation system. the catalytic ozonation of xylene was conducted using a bench scale set-up consisted of a syringe pump,an air pump, an ozone generator, and a glass reactor packed with activated carbon. Several experimental run was defined to investigate the influence of the selected operational variables.