Enhancing Sustainability in Advanced Oxidation Processes: CoFe 2 O 4 as a Catalyst Reinforcement for Tartrazine Dye Degradation

Globalization has increased production in various industries, including textiles, food, and pharmaceuticals. These industries employ different dyes in production, leading to undesired discharge, which conventional treatment fails to remove from the water. The present study aims to synthesize, characterize, and use different pure catalysts (TiO 2 and Zn 2 SnO 4 ) and their compounds doped with CoFe 2 O 4 together with ozone (O 3 ) for the degradation of the azo dye yellow tartrazine (TZ), evaluating the process. For this characterization, N 2 porosimeter, zeta potential, X-ray diffraction, SEM-EDS, and diffuse reflectance spectra were used. Specific surface areas (m 2 g −1 ) of 109, 106, 65, and 83 were used for TiO 2 , CoFe 2 O 4 /TiO 2 , Zn 2 SnO 4 , and CoFe 2 O 4 /Zn 2 SnO 4 , respectively. Both compounds are characterized as nanocatalysts as they have a band gap of 2.75 and 2.83 eV and average particle size of 98 and 85 nm for CoFe 2 O 4 /TiO 2 and Zn 2 SnO 4 , respectively. We employed a reactional model, which was able to describe the catalytic ozonation for all cases, with a low R 2 of 0.9731. The combination of processes increased TZ degradation from 57% to 74% compared to O 3 alone, achieving a maximum degradation of 98.5% within 50 min of catalysis at a low ozone flow rate. This highlights the potential of the produced catalysts for energy-efficient effluent treatment.