Annular flow reactor with side-by-side titania-deposited self-luminous textile and glass fiber velvet for efficient aqueous treatment of active pharmaceutical ingredients
Résumé
The release of active pharmaceutical ingredients (APIs) in natural environment has become a global issue. Used as a complementary remediation solution, the heterogenous photocatalysis is underperformed in terms of operation cost per volume of treated wastewater if the nonimmobilized catalyst needs to be recovered. This work has identified two promising substrates for the immobilization of TiO2-based photocatalysts, namely a glass fiber velvet and a self-luminous textile. The former demonstrated good catalyst attachment and can receive high irradiation intensity from the external UV lamp but required large working volume in the reactor. While the latter suffered from low irradiation intensity delivered by the internal optical fibers, it exhibited high flexibility in shape. Subsequently, a side-by-side combination the above two substrates was implemented in a horizontal annular flow reactor without the need to expand the reactor volume. Using HPLC-MS/MS, ion chromatography, and TOC analysis, the system achieved over 90% degradation of phenol and paracetamol as model pollutants within 60 minutes and an 80% mineralization rate within 120 minutes under laboratory conditions. Furthermore, the system demonstrated cost-efficient degradation of multiple pharmaceutical compounds-achieving 98.3% degradation of caffeine-and a 66% reduction in TOC in a real effluent sample collected from an urban wastewater treatment plant (WWTP) after 360 minutes of treatment, despite the sample's high organic carbon content and elevated inorganic ion concentrations.
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