Photocatalysis is deemed as a promising technology to control NO emissions due to its high degradation efficiency and environmental friendliness. Most of the studies focus on photocatalyst synthesis, whereas the design of photoreactor attracts less attention, which greatly impairs the industrialization of photocatalytic technology in environmental treatment. In this work, we design and fabricate a novel packed-glass-bead photoreactor (PGBR) for NO removal using GQDs/BiOCl catalysts. This new photoreactor achieves a NO photodegradation efficiency 1.6 times greater than that of the flat plate reactor (FPR). The synthesized GQDs/BiOCl catalysts used in PGBR have excellent durability and regeneration. Its degradation performance only decreased by 8.0% during three consecutive cycles. Subsequently, the catalytic activity could be fully restored by facile thermal regeneration. More importantly, the PGBR reaches 94.3% of NO degradation efficiency under natural sunlight, which demonstrates great potential for industrial application. In addition, the kinetic parameters determined using particle swarm optimization algorithm in a simple FPR are utilized to model the complex PGBR using CFD simulations; the RMSE between corrected model results and experimental data is 3.88%. The resolved velocity and concentration fields revealed an enhanced mass transfer effect in the PGBR.
 

photocatalysis; packed-glass-bead reactor; NO removal; photoreactor modeling