ABSTRACT
Over the years, oil spillage has been precarious and most of the time unpredictable. It misbalances the ecosystem directly and indirectly on a rampage scheme, claiming thousands of marine lives; animals and plants and in some cases humans too. Whenever it occurs, the oil being less dense than water floats on it, which simply means that there is no limit to the extend it goes as most of the known part of the universe is connected by water. Conventional methods for tertiary oil spill containment are often energy intensive and require huge amount of sorbents and dispersants and in addition the methods do not destroy the pollutants in oil spills. In this work, ZnO-ZnFe2O4 composite was successfully synthesized using microwave combustion method. The molar ratio of Fe to Zn in the composite is 0.16. X-Ray Diffraction Analysis (XRD) shows that the synthesized ZnO-ZnFe2O4 composite is crystalline, and has very low crystallite sizes. The Scanning Electron Microscopy (SEM) image indicates that the ZnO-ZnFe2O4 composite is highly porous material with uniformly dispersed particles. Quadratic model was developed with R 2 value of 0.9993 and adjusted R 2 value of 0.9985, respectively. ZnO-ZnFe2O4 dosage and initial concentration of naphthalene have the largest effect on degradation process. The highest photocatalytic degradation of naphthalene was achieved at salinity of zero (that is in fresh water). The predicted optimum conditions for photocatalytic degradation of naphthalene using the ZnO-ZnFe2O4 composites are: initial naphthalene concentration of 16.8mg/L, ZnO-ZnFe2O4 dosage of 0.50 g/L, and salinity of 0 ppt. The experimental and the predicted values of naphthalene degradation under the predicted optimum values are 98.8 % and 99.04 % respectively. Hence, the developed quadratic model is reliable for predicting photocatalytic degradation of naphthalene.