Photocatalytic degradation of phenol by titanium dioxide illuminated by one light emitting diode (LED) in a batch photocatalytic reactor is reported in this paper. The effect of catalyst loading, catalyst type, phenol-hydrogen peroxide ratio, pH, initial phenol concentration and irradiance by applying pulse width modulation (PWM) was studied. The effect of the beam width on photocatalytic degradation of phenol is also included in this paper as is the use of different type of reflectors outside the reactor. With both an LED beam width of 120 degrees and optimal chemical conditions of 10 ppm phenol concentration with a hydrogen peroxide-phenol molar ratio of 100 and pH of 4.8, a degradation rate of 42% was achieved after 4h. Decreasing the beam width to 40 raised degradation to 87%. In order to study the irradiance distribution and its effect on the reactor performance, experiments were conducted incorporating various catalysts loading, reactor heights and beam widths. The irradiance was measured for different amount of catalyst loading ranging from 0.17 to 1.8 g L-1 at different reactor heights. The results are compared with optimal catalyst loading measurement to assess the correlation between phenol degradation and irradiance distribution. The UV LED in combination with titanium dioxide is appropriate for water treatment to degrade organic pollutants at low concentration. (C) 2013 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.