Enhanced photocatalytic removal of phenol from aqueous solutions using ZnO modified with Ag

[Display omitted] •Ag/ZnO photocatalysts were synthesized through photodeposition method.•Photocatalytic treatment of phenol aqueous solutions using Ag/ZnO.•The optimal Ag content was 0.88wt%.•Complete phenol degradation and mineralization under UV light.•Ag nanoparticles improve the photocatalytic activity. Different photocatalysts based on commercial ZnO modified by silver photodeposition were prepared in this work. The samples were characterized by X-ray fluorescence spectrometry (XRF), specific surface area (SSA), transmission electron microscopy (TEM), X-ray photoelectron spectroscopy (XPS), X-ray diffraction (XRD) and UV–vis diffuse reflectance (UV–vis DRS). XRD and XPS showed that Ag/ZnO samples are composed of metallic Ag (Ag0) and ZnO structure was identified. Furthermore, TEM analysis evidenced that the number of silver particles increased with the Ag content. At last, UV–vis DRS results revealed a reflectance band for Ag/ZnO samples, ascribed to the surface plasmon resonance (SPR) absorption of metal silver particles. Commercial ZnO and Ag/ZnO samples were evaluated in the phenol removal under UV light irradiation. It was observed an enhancement of photocatalytic phenol removal from aqueous solutions by silver addition in comparison to commercial ZnO. In particular, the phenol removal increased with the silver content from 0.14 to 0.88wt%, after this content (i.e 1.28wt%) the phenol degradation significantly decreased indicating that the optimal Ag content was equal to 0.88wt%. The influence of the best photocatalyst dosage and the change of the initial phenol concentration in solution were also investigated in this work and the best photocatalytic performance was obtained by using 50mgL−1 of phenol initial concentration and 0.15gL−1 of photocatalyst dosage. Finally, the optimized Ag/ZnO photocatalyst was employed for the treatment of a real drinking wastewater containing phenol in which the almost total phenol removal was achieved after 180min of UV irradiation time.