Petcoke Revalorization as Support for ZnO-based Photocatalyst

Petcoke is a residue from the petroleum oil industry which, due to its physicochemical characteristics and content of organic and inorganic material, can be exploited and revalued in order to be used to improve the photocatalytic properties of different semiconductors. With this in mind, the present work shows the evaluation of petcoke as a support material to ZnO to reduce organic pollutants in the aqueous phase. In order to synthesized the ZnO-petcoke composite, the petcoke was stabilized previously to its addition to the ZnO precursor solution. ZnO-petcoke composites were characterized with different spectrophotometric and physicochemical techniques and evaluated in the photodegradation reaction of methyl orange. The ZnO supported with petcoke thermally stabilized was the composite with the best degradation performance reaching a 30% higher removal efficiency than unsupported ZnO. The results indicated that it is possible to revalorize petcoke materials as carbon additives for improving the photocatalytic performance of semiconductors. Simple thermal annealing is enough for creating stable materials with improved pollutant removal capacities.