Kinetic modeling of nalidixic acid degradation by clinoptilolite nanorod-catalyzed ozonation process

The removal of nalidixic acid (NAD) through the clinoptilolite nanorod (CN)-catalyzed ozonation process was modeled by three types of kinetic approaches. By using the glow discharge plasma (GDP) technique, natural clinoptilolite microparticles (NCMs) were successfully converted to CNs. The samples were characterized by scanning electron microscopy (SEM) and Brunauer-Emmett-Teller (BET) analysis. The impacts of ozone inlet flow rate, catalyst concentration, pH and NAD initial concentration were examined to find out the kinetic characteristics of the heterogeneous catalytic ozonation. Based on the intrinsic elementary reactions of the heterogeneous catalytic ozonation process, a novel kinetic model was developed and validated. An empirical kinetic model and an artificial neural network (ANN) model were established in order to appraise the accuracy of the proposed intrinsic kinetic model by a 3-layer feed-forward back-propagation network with the topology of 4:14:1. The error functions and analysis of variance (ANOVA) were used to compare the performance of the three models.