Electrochemical oxidation technique to pharmaceutical pollutants removal.

Human progress in medical science and drug production has improved the growth process and increased human lifespan. Most of the drugs used are to control or prevent common human diseases. These drugs can be produced in different ways such as synthetic, chemical, biological, etc. On the other hand, pharmaceutical companies have a large volume of pharmaceutical effluents and wastewater that enters the environment and harms nature and human life. The main problems of entering the pharmaceutical effluent into the environmental cycle are the creation of drug resistance against the active substance of the drugs and the occurrence of abnormalities in the next generations. Therefore, the process of pharmaceutical wastewater treatment is used to reduce the level of pharmaceutical pollutants in order to enter the pharmaceutical wastewater into the environmental cycle. Until recently, filtration, passing through reverse osmosis and ion exchange resins, cleaning facilities, etc., have been various methods to remove pharmaceutical pollutants. Due to the low efficiency of the usual and old systems, the use of new methods has attracted more attention. In this article, the aim is to investigate the electrochemical oxidation method in order to remove the active ingredient of some commonly used drugs (aspirin, atorvastatin, metformin, metronidazole and ibuprofen) from the wastewater of pharmaceuticals. Therefore, in order to observe the initial conditions of the samples, a cyclic voltammetry diagram with a scanning rate of 100 mV/s has been performed. Next, by using the chronoamperometry process and applying a constant potential, the desired drugs were subjected to the electrochemical process of oxidation. As a result, the re-examined samples were subjected to cyclic voltammetry test to determine the conditions of sample oxidation peaks as well as the removal efficiency of the samples by examining the surface under the initial and final voltammetry graph. The results indicate that this method for removing selected drugs has a high removal efficiency of about 70% and 100% for atorvastatin samples. Therefore, this method is accurate, reproducible (RSD 2%), efficient, easy and economical and can be used in drug manufacturing industries. This method is used in a wide range of drug concentration. This means that by increasing the concentration of the drug, without the need to change the equipment used and the applied potential, by spending more time in the oxidation process, it is possible to remove very high amounts of the drug (more than 1000 ppm).