PHOTOLYTIC AND PHOTOCATALYTIC DECOMPOSITION OF PHARMACEUTICALS IN WATER BY ULTRAVIOLET LIGHT-EMITTING DIODE

摘要

Pharmaceutical residues in the environment and their potential toxic effects have been recognized as one of the most emerging research areas in environmental chemistry. Among many treatment technologies for pharmaceuticals, ultraviolet (UV)-based oxidation has gained popularity as it has capability to decompose a broad range of refractory chemicals. As an alternative UV source to problematic conventional mercury lamps, light-emitting diode (LED), so-called UV-LED, has gained attraction. UV-LED shows many advantages such as high efficiency, low power consumption, long lifetime, no disposal problem, no warming-up time, and compactness. Although over the last decade and half several research has been done on decomposition of pharmaceutical products using heterogeneous photocatalysis and photolysis very little importance has been given to the parameters like wavelength of light, intensity of light. Analysis of SMX showed that considerable photolytic decomposition was obtained using UVC while UVA and UVC were very effective for photocatalytic decomposition process. From high intensity to low intensity brought down the degradation from 90% to 0%, thus showing its significance.