Photocatalytic Degradation of Pharmaceuticals Wastewater

Abstract

Heterogeneous photocatalysis process has proven its points of interest over traditional strategies for wastewater treatment. In the present study the heterogeneous photocatalysis treatment was applied for degradation of the pharmaceutical wastewater of cetirizine by using TiO2 as photocatalyst. The experiments were run in slurry mode and fixed mode. The input parameters which were differed are pH, cetirizine concentration, TiO2 dose and time. Optimization was performed by using RSM. The experiments were performed at the optimized condition for fixed bed treatment utilizing TiO2 immobilized on pumic stone. At the optimized conditions pH=3.35 and TiO2 dosage 2.32g/l obtained from RSM the % degradation was observed to be 98.38% for slurry mode for 410 minutes and for fixed bed the % degradation was 71.5% for 600 minutes. The results concludes that at the lower flow rate the % degradation was maximum. Because at lower flow rate wastewater is getting more time to remain in contact with photocatalyst due to which degradation occurs. Kinetic study showed that degradation of cetirizine follows first order kinetics with rate constant value k = 0.007 min-1. The results demonstrates that the predictions agreed with the experimental results.