Cold atmospheric plasma a novel method for degradation of pharmaceutical compound in water

Abstract

In this paper, the effect of cold plasma treatment on the removal of amoxicillin from its aqueous solution is investigated. First, the atmospheric cold plasma system made based on the dielectric barrier discharge. The geometry of this system is cylindrical and air plasma generates with AC electrical discharge at atmospheric pressure. The treatment was performed in such a way that the liquid was flowed in a thin layer on the surface of the internal electrode of the plasma reactor and was subjected to plasma at different times from 5 to 120 minutes. Hear, for experiments, 3 liters of amoxicillin solution with an initial concentration of 100 mg/lit was used. Then, the aeration effect was investigated by simultaneous injection of oxygen gas. In this work, the analysis was performed using HPLC. The results showed that after 120 minutes of treatment, the concentration of amoxicillin decreased by about 88% and the synergy of oxygen gas improved the degradation process by about 13%. Therefore, high-energy electrons and oxidizing species produced in the cold plasma system can well degrade amoxicillin. It is predicted that with this method, water can be free of medicinal compounds, without the need to use chemicals or filtration.

Keywords

• cold plasma
• dielectric discharge barrier
• amoxicillin
• hplc