Effect of Background Water Matrices on Pharmaceutical and Personal Care Product Removal by UV-LED/TiO2

Abstract

In this study, we evaluated the effectiveness of UV-LED-irradiated TiO2 in removing 24 commonly detected PPCPs in two water matrices (municipal wastewater effluent and Suwannee River NOM–synthetic water) and compared their performance with that of ultrapure water. Relatively fast removal kinetics were observed for 29% and 12% of the PPCPs in ultrapure water and synthetic surface water, respectively (kapp of 1–2 min−1). However, they all remained recalcitrant to photocatalysis when using wastewater effluent as the background matrix (kapp < 0.1 min−1). We also observed that the pH-corrected octanol/water partition coefficient (log Dow) correlated well with PPCP degradation rate constants in ultrapure water, whereas molecular weight was strongly associated with the rate constants in both synthetic surface water and wastewater. The electrical energy per order (EEO) values calculated at the end of the experiments suggest that UV-LED/P25 can be an energy-efficient method for water treatment applications (2.96, 4.77, and 16.36 kW h m−3 in ultrapure water, synthetic surface water, and wastewater effluents, respectively). Although TiO2 photocatalysis is a promising approach in removing PPCPs, our results indicate that additional challenges need to be overcome for PPCPs in more complex water matrices, including an assessment of photocatalytic removal under different background water matrices.

Coupling Adsorption-Photocatalytic Degradation of Methylene Blue and Maxilon Red

“…The effect of molecular structure and functional groups on photocatalytic degradation was studied by various researchers [ 32 , 33 ]. Methylene Blue and Maxilon Red differ in their molecular structure, and functional group, as well as in the extent of ionization in an aqueous solution.…”

Titanium Nanostructures: Advancing Photocatalysis in Complex Systems

“…Additionally, tap water may also contain trace amounts of metal ions, such as iron and copper, which can act as Fenton-like catalysts, generating additional ROS through the Haber-Weiss reaction. These ROS can then participate in secondary oxidation reactions, leading to further degradation of the dye molecules [27,28].…”

Uv/Tio2 Photocatalysis as Post-Treatment for Anaerobic Membrane Bioreactor Effluent for Reuse

“…In general, developments in reactor design (Dai et al, 2013;Natarajan et al, 2011) are beneficial to enhance the UV transmission efficiency regardless of the effluent matrix, which can ultimately improve the overall photocatalysis performance. Therefore, by tackling the current weaknesses, UV/TiO 2 can be a promising post-treatment solution for the AnMBR effluent, specifically when facing the challenge from emerging contaminants (Carra et al, 2015(Carra et al, , 2016Fattahi et al, 2021;Kanakaraju et al, 2018) in modern water reuse applications.…”