Degradation of 40 selected pharmaceuticals by UV/H2O2

The occurrence of pharmaceuticals in source waters is increasing. Although UV advanced oxidation is known to be an effective barrier against micropollutants, degradation rates are only available for limited amounts of pharmaceuticals. Therefore, the degradation of a large group of pharmaceuticals has been studied in this research for the UV/H2O2 process under different conditions, including pharmaceuticals of which the degradation by UV/H2O2 was never reported before (e.g., metformin, paroxetine, pindolol, sotalol, venlafaxine, etc.). Monochromatic low pressure (LP) and polychromatic medium pressure (MP) lamps were used for three different water matrices. In order to have well defined hydraulic conditions, all experiments were conducted in a collimated beam apparatus. Degradation rates for the pharmaceuticals were determined. For those compounds used in this research that are also reported in literature, measured degradation results are in good agreement with literature data. Pharmaceutical degradation for only photolysis with LP lamps is small, which is increased by using a MP lamp. Most of the pharmaceuticals are well removed when applying both UV (either LP or MP) and H2O2. However, differences in degradation rates between pharmaceuticals can be large. For example, ketoprofen, prednisolone, pindolol are very well removed by UV/H2O2, whereas metformin, cyclophosphamide, ifosfamide are very little removed by UV/H2O2.