Mesoporous CeO2 Catalyst Synthesized by Using Cellulose as Template for the Ozonation of Phenol

Mesoporous CeO2 was synthesized by a sol-gel method using the biological renewable microcrystalline cellulose (MCC) as the template and Ce(NO3)(3)center dot 6H(2)O as the precursor of CeO2. XRD, TEM, N-2 adsorption-desorption, and XPS were used for mesoporous CeO2 characterization. The results show that CeO2 nano-particles possess an average size of 7 similar to 10 nm, and specific area of CeO2 synthesized with MCC template is approximately 5.5 times higher than CeO2 synthesized without MCC. The ozonation catalyzed by CeO2-T (with MCC) could remove 91.7% of phenol compared to 51.6% for single ozonation and 68.3% for CeO2-W (without MCC) catalyzed ozonation. The COD removal efficiency is significantly higher for ozonation with CeO2-T (69.2%) than that of CeO2-W (49.5%) or ozonation alone (21.0%). The good performance of CeO2-T is attributed to the high specific area and Ce(III)/Ce(IV) redox couple. During catalytic ozonation, the activation energy of catalytic ozonation (20.7 kJ mol(-1)) is much lower than that of single ozonation (54.7 kJ mol(-1)).