Photocatalytic degradation of Pemetrexed drug in water
Date
2022-09-04
Authors
Hadeel Adel Ali Abu Khaleel
هديل عادل علي ابو خليل
Journal Title
Journal ISSN
Volume Title
Publisher
Al-Quds University
Abstract
Pharmaceutical compounds pose a threat to the environment and human health, due to their extensive use, incorrect disposal ways, and post contamination of aquatic bodies. Pemetrexed (PEME) is one of the types of medicine that is used to treat lung cancer, which is detected in water and has become one of the pharmaceuticals drugs that is polluting the water. In this work, advanced oxidation processes AOPs are effective and promising technologies for the degradation of pharmaceutical contaminants in polluted water. So, the goal of our research was to find a suitable photocatalysis system as an effective AOPs for removing PEME. Three photocatalytic systems were investigated to remove PEME from polluted water (TiO2/UV-C), (K2S2O8/UV-C), and (TiO2/K2S2O8/UV-C), and these systems successfully removed PEME, the Reversed-phase HPLC was used to analyze all samples. The photodegradation efficiency of (TiO2/UV-C) and (K2S2O8/UV-C) for removing PEME was satisfactorily. When the experiments were conducted at pH value of 3.0, either by using 1.0 gm TiO2 for 30 min or 0.5 gm of K2S2O8 for 10 min, the efficiency was decreased from 98.9% to 98.8%, respectively. One the other hand, (TiO2/ K2S2O8/UV-C) system show less efficiency 98.2% when the experiment was conducted at pH=3.0 for 60 min with using 0.25 gm TiO2 and 0.25 gm K2S2O8.