An innovative pilot scale vortex photoreactor was used to treat secondary wastewater to remove a range of pharmaceuticals via advanced oxidation (UV/H2O2). �Influent� wastewater samples were spiked with a mixture of 14 pharmaceutical compounds selected as probe molecules. The reactor was operated at several peroxide doses and detention times to examine the effects of these variables on reactor performance.  Samples were concentrated using solid phase extraction and extracts were analyzed using liquid chromatography-quadrupole time-of-flight mass spectrometry (LC-QTOF) to quantify concentrations of pharmaceutical probes and to identify nontarget molecules and determine relative changes in their concentrations across the reactor.  �Molecular features,� (i.e., groups of isotopes, charge states, adducts, and multimers) were filtered to remove features present in the blank samples and to eliminate ions that were observed in a limited number of samples.  As expected, the number of significantly transformed constituents generally increased as detention time and peroxide dose increased.  A reaction pathway model was used to predict transformation products of the probe molecules and some of these products were tentatively identified in the effluent samples. The hybrid target/nontarget analytical approach provided a comprehensive way to examine the destruction of organic constituents in wastewater and the associated formation of byproducts.

Pharmaceutical degradation and byproduct formation in an innovative UV/H2O2 advanced oxidation reactor

248th National Meeting (2014)

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