Coupling Electro-oxidation and UV Photolysis for Amoxicillin and Ibuprofen Synthetic Wastewater Treatment
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Date
2026-07
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Addis Ababa University
Abstract
The rapid growth and population increase globally have led to a worsening of water pollution. One of the significant environmental concerns is the presence of pharmaceutical pollutants in water. These pharmaceutical pollutants are recalcitrant and are typically found in low concentrations in water matrices. Conventional treatments used to treat municipal wastewaters are ineffective in removing pharmaceuticals. Recently, advanced oxidation processes (AOPs) such as EO and UV have shown promising results in effectively mineralizing pharmaceutical pollutants. The following studies examined the effectiveness operational parameters in active chlorine generation using EO and coupling EO and UV for the treatment of AMOX and IBU. The first study focused on investigating the combined effects of operational parameters on residual chlorine production using response surface methodology (RSM) and artificial neural network (ANN) techniques. The study evaluated the impact of sodium chloride concentration, electrical potential, electrolysis time, and electrode gap on residual chlorine production and energy consumption. The optimal conditions for residual chlorine production were found to be an electrical potential of 8.8 V, an electrolysis time of 25 minutes, a sodium chloride concentration of 25 g/L, and an electrode distance of 1 cm, resulting in a residual chlorine level of 2450 mg/L and an energy consumption of 21.76 kWh/L. It was revealed that electric potential, sodium chloride concentration, and electrolysis time had a positive influence on residual chlorine production. The study also indicated that the ANN models outperformed the RSM models in terms of prediction ability, suggesting the potential use of electrolysis for active chlorine production from saline solutions in industrial and water disinfection applications. In the subsequent experiment, electro-oxidation (EO) of synthetic wastewater containing amoxicillin (AMOX) and Ibuprofen (IBU) was carried out using Ti/IrO2 electrodes in a batch reactor setup. The optimization of the EO process was performed using response surface methodology (RSM) to examine the effects of pH, current density, and initial concentrations of AMOX and IBU on the degradation of pollutants and Chemical Oxygen Demand (COD) removal. The optimal conditions for the degradation of AMOX and IBU were determined to be pH 3, current density of 10 mA cm-2, and initial concentrations of AMOX and IBU at 276 μg/L
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ANN, electro-oxidation, energy consumption, optimization, residual chlorine, RSM