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Enhanced ferromagnetic and visible light active titanium dioxide (TiO2) photocatalyst was synthesised by depositing a hard ferromagnet strontium ferrite (SrFe12O19) onto TiO2 via an effortless hydrothermal and poly-condensation method. The catalysts were characterised by X-ray diffraction (XRD), transmission electron microscope (TEM), energy dispersive X-ray spectroscopy (EDS), BET surface analysis, vibrating sample magnetometer (VSM), X-ray photon spectroscopy (XPS), Fourier transform infrared spectroscopy (FT-IR) and UV-visible light spectroscopy analysis. The prepared nanocomposite photocatalyst exhibited physically a powerful ferromagnetic property with significant stability against the loss of its magnetic property (coercivity ≈2200 G). The catalyst can be fluidised and recovered by an external magnetic field enhancing separation and mixing efficiency. Furthermore, it resulted in a reduced band gap (≈2.3 eV) which resulted in enhanced visible light absorption compared with unsupported TiO2. The photo...

Biodegradation of phenol by predominantly Pseudomonas species isolated from a sewage wastewater treatment plant was investigated in batch shake flasks. Phenol with a lower concentration of 100 mg/L was degraded in 10 h and a highest of 800 mg/L in 69 h. The phenol degradation rate was observed to vary largely with the concentrations of phenol used and was found to be less than 10 mg/L/h at both the extremes of the initial concentrations. The degradation kinetics was found follow the three half-order kinetic model with the regression greater than 0.97. The specific substrate utilization rates of the culture at various initial phenol concentrations were fitted to modified substrate inhibition kinetic models of Edward, Haldane, Luong, Han–Levenspiel and Yano–Koga. Among these models the Edward was found to fit the data well with a minimum Root Mean Square error value of 0.0039.