Hospital wastewater treatment with pilot-scale pulsed corona discharge for removal of pharmaceutical residues

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Journal Title
Journal ISSN
Volume Title
A1 Alkuperäisartikkeli tieteellisessä aikakauslehdessä
Date
2018-04-01
Major/Subject
Mcode
Degree programme
Language
en
Pages
9
1569-1577
Series
Journal of Environmental Chemical Engineering, Volume 6, issue 2
Abstract
In recent years, accumulation of pharmaceutical compounds in the environment has been an issue of growing concern. Conventional wastewater treatment has limited effectiveness with many pharmaceuticals at concentrations of ppb or ppt scale. An intuitive solution would be to treat the pharmaceuticals-contaminated wastewaters at the source sites before dilution in sewer networks. Health institutions with concentrated drug consumption provide logical point sources for pharmaceuticals entering the sewage. This paper describes the pilot-scale removal of a wide range of pharmaceuticals from real wastewaters via gas-phase pulsed corona discharge oxidation. The process was studied for raw sewage from a public hospital and for biologically treated wastewater of a health-care institute. The non-selective oxidation of the observed pharmaceuticals (32 compounds) was effective at reasonable energy cost: 87-% reduction in residual pharmaceuticals (excluding biodegradable caffeine) from raw sewage was attained with 1 kWh m−3from the raw sewage and 100% removal was achieved for biologically treated wastewater at only 0.5 kWh m−3. The impact for affected aquatic environments upon the present solution would be a dramatically reduced load of pharmaceutical accumulation.
Description
Keywords
Drug, Hydroxyl radical, Micropollutant, Non-thermal plasma, Ozone
Other note
Citation
Ajo , P , Preis , S , Vornamo , T , Mänttäri , M , Kallioinen , M & Louhi-Kultanen , M 2018 , ' Hospital wastewater treatment with pilot-scale pulsed corona discharge for removal of pharmaceutical residues ' , Journal of Environmental Chemical Engineering , vol. 6 , no. 2 , pp. 1569-1577 . https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jece.2018.02.007