The fate and transformation of pharmaceutical and personal care products in wastewater treatment plants – (ii)

• Main Author: Ng, Thai Yeng
• Other Authors: Tan Soon Keat
• Format: Final Year Project
• Language: English
• Published: 2015
• Subjects: DRNTU::Engineering::Environmental engineering::Water treatment
• Online Access: http://hdl.handle.net/10356/63727
• Institution: Nanyang Technological University

Pharmaceuticals are emerging pollutants, widely found in today’s wastewaters. Their exposure to humans has raised the alarm worldwide, where many sought solutions to eliminate these pollutants in the wastewaters through treatment processes such as the MBR. Seven pharmaceuticals, namely, Caffeine, Carbamazepine, Diclofenac, Ibuprofen, Ketoprofen, Naproxen and Salicylic acid had been experimented to study their removals by the MBR, with relevance to two HRTs at 15 and 11 hours. In addition, an experiment was conducted to investigate possible sludge removal effects on these pharmaceuticals’ removal. This report incorporated findings from past researches as a basis of discussion for the results. Of the seven pharmaceuticals, only caffeine, ibuprofen and salicylic acid produced satisfactory removal results whilst ketoprofen and naproxen displayed the potential to be removed efficiently. Contrastingly, diclofenac was inconclusive due to diverse results obtained and carbamazepine was deemed as resistant to removal by MBR with its unsatisfactory removal performance. Across the two HRTs, only caffeine and naproxen demonstrated higher removal efficiencies with a longer HRT whereas salicylic acid verified to be independent of HRT. Ketoprofen was inclined to be independent of HRT but more studies are required to affirm this relationship. HRT’s relationship with the remaining pharmaceuticals were indeterminable. For the effects in response to a reduced sludge concentration, most pharmaceuticals proved to be efficiently removed even at lower sludge concentrations with TSS of 2g/L in contrast to 6g/L. This is with the exception of carbamazepine and diclofenac as they persist with poor and peculiar removal results, respectively. It is recommended for future studies to explore a wider range of HRTs to gain better insights on the relationship between HRT and pharmaceuticals’ removal due to a lack of research conducted in this aspect.