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Zirconia (ZrO2) is a noteworthy metal oxide because of its characteristics. It can be implemented in different applications; adsorption of pollutant, and photocatalytic oxidation. The main focus of this research was to synthesize ZrO2 from low cost and locally available materials; zircon. As well the preparation of ZrO2 was conducted at different temperature procedures. Characterization of prepared materials was performed using X-ray diffraction (XRD), Fourier transform infrared spectra (FTIR) and scanning electron microscope (SEM) which confirmed the production of homogeneous spherical crystalline ZrO2 compared with commercial ZrO2. Moreover, ZrO2-500 was examined for removal of dye using adsorption and photocatalytic activities. The removal adsorptive capacity of ZrO2-500 for red dye 195 was decreased from 37.1 to 2.2 mg/g with increasing dose up to 3 g/L. Meanwhile, red dye was removed with rate constant of 0.132 - 0.324 h-1 under solar simulator. Finally, zirconia was successively prepared from low cost materials with lower energy and materials consumption.

Article history: Received on: 13/10/2015 Revised on: 15/11/2015 Accepted on: 02/12/2015 Available online: 27/02/2016 This study explored the effect of nano-crystalline cellulose (NCC) on Meloxicam (MX) solid dispersion (SD) prepared by co-grinding technique compared to micro-crystalline cellulose (MCC) in presence of lactose. MXtablets were prepared by direct compression of different co-ground SDs or physical mixtures. The solubility, dissolution, SEM and DSC of different preparations were studied. Flow-through cell apparatus (FTC) was used to study the dissolution of MX from tablets at pH 7.4. Generally, the results revealed that increasing NCC loadings showed a direct increase in both the solubility and dissolution of MX. MCC did not improve either the solubility or the dissolution of MX in the physical mixture, while, co-grinding dramatically decreased the dissolution rate of MX. It was interesting to find that grinding of MX-powder alone or in a mixture with lactose highly increased MX solubility and dissolution. SEM as well as DSC were found to be very good tools, without a single exception, to describe the observed solubility and dissolution of MX in these proposed preparations. SEM-images showed the particle size reduction upon grinding or co-grinding techniques. While DSC-data proved that the crystalline structure of MX has been changed to an amorphous state.