Author

Sarah Pishyar

Date of Award

2023

Publication Type

Thesis

Degree Name

M.A.Sc.

Department

Civil and Environmental Engineering

Keywords

Enzymatic removal, Pharmaceutical wastewater, Soybean peroxide, Wastewater treatment, Diclofenac, Aceclofenac

Supervisor

K.E.Taylor

Supervisor

N.Biswas

Rights

info:eu-repo/semantics/openAccess

Creative Commons License

Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.

Abstract

Pharmaceutical medications that are a class of emerging contaminants have been detected in wastewater treatment facilities' influent and effluent, and they have reached water sources in amounts ranging from ng/L to ug/L. They threaten the environment and non-target life. Soybean peroxidase (SBP)-catalyzed process was studied to remove two non-steroidal anti-inflammatory drugs (NSAIDS) diclofenac and aceclofenac through enzymatic oxidation from synthetic wastewater. SBP can be extracted from soybean hulls, a by-product of the soybean industry. First, the experiments studied the viability of SBP-catalyzed removal on these two compounds, then the operational parameters including pH, the molar ratio between hydrogen peroxide and substrate and minimum effective enzyme concentration were optimized. The first-order rate constant and half-life of each substrate were also determined under the established optimum conditions. The results demonstrated SBP is robust enzyme to achieve more than 95% removal efficiency for both compounds. Finally, possible oligomerization products of enzymatic treatment were characterized by mass spectrometric analysis and showed formation of tetramer.

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