Quantification of pharmaceutical compounds in wastewater samples by near infrared spectroscopy (NIR)

The quantification of pollutants, as pharmaceuticals, in wastewater is an issue of special concern. Usually, typical methods to quantify these products are time and reagent consuming. This paper describes the development and validation of a Fourier transform near-infrared (FT-NIR) spectroscopy methodology for the quantification of pharmaceuticals in wastewaters. For this purpose, 276 samples obtained from an activated sludge wastewater treatment process were analysed in the range of 200 cm^-1 to 14,000 cm^-1, and further treated by chemometric techniques to develop and validate the quantification models. The obtained results were found adequate for the prediction of ibuprofen, sulfamethoxazole, 17β-estradiol and carbamazepine with coefficients of determination (R²) around 0.95 and residual prediction deviation (RPD) values above four, for the overall (training and validation) data points. These results are very promising and confirm that this technology can be seen as an alternative for the quantification of pharmaceuticals in wastewater.