Abstract
Because of the increased activities of industrial areas, especially textiles, a huge amount of toxic waste has been accumulated, which badly affects the ecosystem. For decades scientists have tried to find an effective solution for this problem. The main objective of this work was to prepare and characterize easily handled nanocomposite beads composed of alginate/ZnO doped with radiation-induced Ag nanoparticles to study the competitive degradation of basic and acidic dyes in one mixture to evaluate its degradation ability for divers dyes. Fourier transform infrared spectroscopy, X-ray diffraction, and transmission electron microscopy studies have helped to characterize nanocomposite hybrid beads with morphological evaluation. The effectiveness of alginate/ZnO/Ag as a catalyst in the degradation of a mixture of basic and acidic dyes was also verified. The main experimental factors such as time, the initial concentration of binary dye mix, and the amount of catalyst were studied to determine the best degradation conditions. The results show that a high percentage of degradation of the dye mixture occurred within 75 min. The amount of ALG/ZnO/Ag beads was optimized as 0.5 g for complete degradation of the dye mixture at concentration of 100 mg/L. The study's results demonstrate that the ALG/ZnO/Ag hybrid nanocomposite catalyst has great ability for the catalytic degradation of a binary mixture of basic and acidic dyes where increasing the amount of catalyst increased the degradation to 95% for basic dye and 85% for acidic dye. In addition, monitoring the degradation process showed that the degradation percentage of basic dye was higher than that of acidic dye in the same mixture.