Pharmaceuticals and personal care products (PPCPs) encompass a vast array of thousands of chemicals substances which are daily used for care, diagnosis, treatment, disease prevention or health condition to improve the quality of life. These compounds are derived from diverse sources and released endlessly to the environment, but their long-term fate requires adequate understanding. In particular, antibiotics increased consumption and low body uptake usher their multiple and frequent detection in wastewater treatment plants and ambient waters, which can induce ecological risks and antibiotic resistance genes. Using a mixture of ten multi-class typical antibiotics as model compounds in this work, we have set up the membrane photobioreactors for investigating their continuous removal with four microalgae species. Observations were first given to the steady removal and to the influences of wastewater nitrate content, light, temperature, and the hydraulic retention time. Generally, the microalgae achieved good antibiotic removal ability with a major contribution of biodegradation.<i> Haematococcus pluvialis </i>strain achieved the highest and steady antibiotic removal. A computational fluid dynamics simulation was applied for residual antibiotic prediction and potential optimization on the operating conditions of the algae reactor. The results will be presented during the conference.

Antibiotics removal by microalgae in a continuous flow membrane photobioreactor: Operating conditions and hydrodynamic simulation

ACS Fall 2021

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