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.
Highlights
Existing water and wastewater treatment technologies can only partially remove emerging organic contaminants such as pharmaceuticals and personal care products (PPCPs)
This study focused on the impact of the background water matrix on TiO2 photocatalytic treatment of 24 target PPCPs
The photocatalytic degradation of PPCPs were compared in ultrapure water, synthetic surface water, and wastewater effluents
Summary
Existing water and wastewater treatment technologies can only partially remove emerging organic contaminants such as pharmaceuticals and personal care products (PPCPs). A total of 80 studies evaluated here, detailed in Table S1 in the Supplementary Materials (SI), including those from our lab [6,7,8,9,10], have intensively investigated the effect of parameters such as photocatalyst type and concentration, light intensity, pH, and organic and inorganic constituents in the background water (i.e., dissolved organic matter, suspended solids, and alkalinity) on PPCP degradation using TiO2 treatment These studies have explored the photocatalytic removals of PPCPs in mixtures, approximately 70% of them investigated TiO2 photocatalytic processes in a pure water matrix and only 30% of these studies have used surface water and wastewater effluents. We assessed the energy efficiency of UV-LED/P25 to remove PPCPs in different background matrices
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