Decolorization and biodegradability of a real pharmaceutical wastewater treated by H2O2-assisted photoelectrocatalysis on TiO2 meshes

In recent years, photoelectrocatalysis (PEC) for the treatment of industrial wastewaters (IWWs) has been repeatedly proposed. However, despite the number of tests reported in literature, only a few of them were conducted on real IWWs. In this study, real pharmaceutical IWWs showing an intense recalcitrant color were treated by PEC and H2O2-assisted PEC (UV/TiO2/Bias and UV/H2O2/TiO2/Bias, respectively) on TiO2 meshes having sub-micrometric features obtained by Plasma Electrolytic Oxidation. Photolysis (UV), chemical oxidation (H2O2) and H2O2-assisted photolysis (UV/H2O2) were tested in the same reactor for comparison. The configuration UV/H2O2/TiO2/bias showed the best results in term of decolorization efficiency and rate, where decolorization was 55 % (single-step H2O2 dosing) and 44 % (three-step H2O2 dosing), after 2 h of contact time. In the same contact time, UV and UV/TiO2/Bias processes did not give decolorization. A more effective COD removal was measured for the PEC processes, UV/H2O2/TiO2/Bias (-24 %) and UV/TiO2/Bias (-20 %), while COD removal by UV was almost 0 %. Correspondingly, the SOUR values showed that PEC combined with a single-step H2O2 dosage was the most effective configuration, leading to the highest biodegradability of the treated IWW with respect to the other processes. The energy consumption analysis demonstrated that PEC+ H2O2 (single-step dosage) optimized energy costs.