Abstract—The removal of pharmaceutical and personal care
products (paracetamol and norfloxacin) in water by vacuum
ultraviolet (VUV) process was studied. The effects of initial
pharmaceutical concentrations (1, 5 and 10 mg/L), initial pHs (5,
7 and 9), VUV powers (30, 60 and 120 W) and bicarbonate
concentrations (100 and 200 mg/L as CaCO3) were investigated.
The experiments under ultraviolet (UV) condition were
performed for comparative purpose. The results showed that
the VUV process exhibited superior degradation performance
than that by the UV process. The rates of both paracetamol and
norfloxacin removals were second order reaction. Higher
concentrations resulted in the decrease of pharmaceutical
degradation rate. The initial pH had slight impact on
pharmaceutical removal efficiency and the neutral pH showed
the highest degradation efficiency. Bicarbonate obviously
decreased the pharmaceutical removal .This is due to from OH•
scavenging and the VUV light absorption of the bicarbonate.
For the effect of VUV powers, removal efficiencies increased as
the increase of VUV powers.
Index Terms—Paracetamol, Norfloxacin, PPCPs, Vacuum
ultraviolet (VUV).
Thunyalux Ratpukdi is with Department of Environmental Engineering,
Faculty of Engineering, Khon Kaen University, Khon Kaen 40002, Thailand
and Center of Excellence for Environmental and Hazardous Waste
Management, Bangkok 10330, Thailand (e-mail: thunyalux@kku.ac.th).
[PDF]
Cite:Thunyalux Ratpukdi, "Degradation of Paracetamol and Norfloxacin in Aqueous Solution Using Vacuum Ultraviolet (VUV) Process," Journal of Clean Energy Technologies vol. 2, no. 2, pp. 168-170, 2014.
