LAUSR

Herein we report a successful degradation of highly concentrated formaldehyde (HCHO, 900 ppm <) effluent from a petrochemical industry using sono-catalytic reaction on highly porous (BET surface of 128 m2 g-1) copper iodide (CuI) nanocrystals as the adsorbent. In this regard, the designed experiments for optimization indicated that the ultrasonic wave (40 kHz) and mass of adsorbent (30 g/L) were significant in HCHO removal so that the combination of the adsorption under ultrasonic degradation resulted in approaching the eliminating efficiency of more than 99%. In this way, GC-MS analysis confirmed the CO2 production during HCHO degradation. Although the physisorption mechanism (-15.56 kJ/mol) limited the HCHO concentration (~100 ppm) for removal, addition of ultrasonic irradiation significantly improved the process to eliminate 986 ppm of HCHO from the real petrochemical effluent. Moreover, the mechanisms of HCHO decomposition were scrutinized through theoretical studies (density functional theory (DFT)), as well as thermodynamic and kinetics theories. Correspondingly, as calculated from the DFT, the highest adsorption on cleavage plane (111) of the adsorbent was shown to be in complete agreement with its XRD analysis in which the main peak corresponds to the lattice plane (111).