Treatment of Pharmaceutical Waste using Advanced Oxidation Processes

Abstract

The present work predominantly deals with the degradation study of refractory pharmaceutical compounds using Advanced Oxidation Methods (AOPs). Compounds selected for the study are pharmaceutical dyes and antibiotic compounds. AOPs offer several advantages such as simple and safe design, low operational time and cost, fairly complete degradation of recalcitrant compounds, no sludge formation, etc. over conventional physicochemical and biological methods. In the present work, different AOPs like H2O2, Fenton, HC, and a combination of HC/H2O2 and HC/Fenton have been applied to degrade Tartrazine dye, Allura Red dye, and antibiotics compounds like Neomycin and Streptomycin sulfate. The effect of parameters such as concentration, pH, Inlet pressure, concentration of oxidizing agents, and catalyst concentration have been studied for each of the compounds. Optimized condition is used for further degradation study of all the compounds. Degradation Kinetics was studied by fitting experimental data in a suitable kinetic model. A pseudo-first-order kinetics was fitted to degradation data at an optimized set of process variables for HC alone, H2O2, Fenton, and combined HC/H2O2 and HC/Fenton reagent. Intermediates formed during degradation has been analysed using Liquid chromatography- Mass spectrometry. newlineThe primary goal of the present work is to investigate the effect of hybrid methods on the removal of selected organic compounds. The efficiency of hybrid processes, HC/H2O2, and HC/Fenton reagent was compared with degradation experiments carried out using HC alone to estimate the synergy factor. Hydrodynamic cavitation is a pressure-driven process so how the effect of different geometry affects the process has been studied by using venturi and orifice plates having multiple holes. The electrical energy required to degrade refractory compounds is evaluated for Hydrodynamic cavitation-based processes in terms of electrical energy efficiency.