Wastewater Treatment of Fluoxetine Unit of Aria Pharmaceuticals Using Catalytic Ozonation Process: Experimental Study and Optimization

Abstract

Discharge of pharmaceutical wastewater into surface and underground water has harmful effects on human health and living organisms, even in low concentrations. For this reason, pharmaceutical wastewater treatment is very important. In this research, wastewater treatment of Aria Pharmaceutical's Fluoxetine production unit was studied using γ-alumina catalysts. The catalyst was synthesized using the co-precipitation method and characterized by XRD, FTIR, FESEM, EDX, and BET methods. In the synthesis of γ-alumina catalyst, aluminum nitrate was used as a precursor, and sodium carbonate was used as the precipitating agent. The central composite design method was used to design experiments and to model and optimize the wastewater treatment using catalytic ozonation. In addition, the effect of the operating parameters on the catalytic ozonation process of Fluoxetine-containing wastewater, including the inlet ozone concentration, the amount of the catalyst, and reaction time, were investigated. Based on the obtained results, a significant agreement was observed between the experimental data of COD removal for wastewater and the values predicted by the CCD method. The results of the Pareto analysis showed that among the studied operational parameters, the reaction time, the amount of catalyst, and the initial concentration of ozone are the most effective parameters on the COD removal with percentages of 35.58%, 34.64% and 10.87%, respectively. Finally, by optimizing the process, the maximum value of COD removal of 92.13% was obtained experimentally for pharmaceutical wastewater using catalytic ozonation process in the reaction time of 30 min, the amount of catalyst of 1 g/L and the ozone concentration of 30 mg/L as optimal conditions.

Keywords

• pharmaceutical wastewater
• fluoxetine
• ozone
• central composite design
• catalyst
• cod