Intensification of abamectin pesticide degradation using the combination of ultrasonic cavitation and visible-light driven photocatalytic process: Synergistic effect and optimization study

The maximum degradation efficiency of 99.93% was found at optimal values as 20 min, 4, 90 mL/min, 0.2 mL/min, 30 mg/L and 0.4 g/L, for irradiation time, pH, solution flow rate, oxygen flow rate, initial concentration and photocatalyst dosage, respectively. Evaluation of the synergism in the combination of ultrasonic and photocatalysis lead to a synergistic index of 2.19, which reveals that coupling of ultrasonic and photocatalysis has a greater efficiency than the sum of individual procedures for degradation of abamectin.