Response surface modeling of ceftriaxone removal from hospital wastewater

In recent decades, an emerging concern of widespread antimicrobial resistance has been raised due to the existence of pharmaceutical samples such as antibiotics in an aqueous medium. Herein, antibiotic ceftriaxone (CTX) removal from hospital wastewater employing a hybrid process of electrocoagulation (EC) and adsorption (AD) was investigated. The response surface methodology (RSM) was employed to study the influences of main operating variables, including initial CTX concentration, pH, current density, reaction time, and chitosan dosage, on the removal efficiency of the treatment process. Under the optimum condition of the employed EC/AD hybrid treatment process, where initial CTX concentration, pH solution, the current density, adsorbent dosage, and reaction time were set at 20.0 mg L^-1, 7.5, 6.0 mA cm^-2, 0.75 g L^-1, and 12.5 min, respectively, the removal efficiency of 100% was achieved. Analysis of variance (ANOVA) confirmed that the developed quadratic treatment model is highly significant. The applied EC/AD hybrid treatment process revealed the electrical energy consumption of 0.84 kWh m^-3 and 0.2168 kWh (g Al)^-1 per cubic meter of hospital wastewater and gram of consumed aluminum electrode, respectively. The second-order kinetic model with R² of 0.9514 and the Langmuir isotherm model with R² of 0.973 best fit the developed EC/AD hybrid treatment process, and q_m was found to be 111.1 mg g^-1. The obtained experimental results confirmed that the CTX concentration of the hospital wastewater was reduced to zero after applying the EC/AD hybrid process.