Enhancing Sustainability in Advanced Oxidation Processes: CoFe2O4 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 (TiO2 and Zn2SnO4) and their compounds doped with CoFe2O4 together with ozone (O3) for the degradation of the azo dye yellow tartrazine (TZ), evaluating the process. For this characterization, N2 porosimeter, zeta potential, X-ray diffraction, SEM-EDS, and diffuse reflectance spectra were used. Specific surface areas (m2 g−1) of 109, 106, 65, and 83 were used for TiO2, CoFe2O4/TiO2, Zn2SnO4, and CoFe2O4/Zn2SnO4, 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 CoFe2O4/TiO2 and Zn2SnO4, respectively. We employed a reactional model, which was able to describe the catalytic ozonation for all cases, with a low R2 of 0.9731. The combination of processes increased TZ degradation from 57% to 74% compared to O3 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.