STM Article Repository

Traditional wastewater mostly contains pharmaceutical ingredients. Therefore, the wastewater must be completely free from antibiotics before its release into the environment. In the present study, photocatalytic degradation was done to investigate the removal efficiency of Oxytetracycline Dihydrate (OTC) using ZnO, ZnO/3%BaTiO3 (3 BZ), ZnO/18%BaTiO3 (18 BZ), ZnO/ 33%BaTiO3 (33 BZ) and ZnO/48%BaTiO3 (48 BZ) under UV light. After the exposure time of 420 min, about 99.57% and 97.87% of OTC was degraded using ZnO and 3 BZ respectively. Further, increasing the amount of BaTiO3 in ZnO prolongs the degradation time. Therefore, faster efficiency was found using ZnO nanoparticles. The observed reaction rate constant using ZnO was 0.00933 min-1 which decreased to 0.00532 min-1 using 48 BZ, indicating the decrease of reaction rate for increasing the amount of BaTiO3. Hence, the use of ZnO photocatalyst is anticipated to be a promising technique for the photocatalytic degradation of contaminated wastewater with oxytetracycline antibiotics using UV light.