Degradation of the pharmaceuticals lamivudine and zidovudine using advanced oxidation processes

The existence of pharmaceuticals in nature is a growing environmental problem, turning necessary the use of efficient treatments for the degradation of these substances, as the advanced oxidation processes (AOPs). In this work the AOPs UV/H 2 O 2 and photo-Fenton were applied to degrade the pharmaceuticals lamivudine and zidovudine in an aqueous solution using a bench reactor, composed of three UV-C lamps. It was verified that the UV/H 2 O 2 process presented a degradation of 97.33 ± 0.14% for lamivudine and 93.90 ± 0.33% for zidovudine, after 180 min of treatment and for an initial concentratin of each pharmaceutical of  5 mg.L -1 and [H 2 O 2 ] of 600 mg.L -1 .  A methodology by artificial neural networks (ANNs) was used to model the photocatalytic process, with the MLP 7-23-2 ANN representing it well, and determining the relative importance (%) of each of the input variables for the pharmaceutical’s degradation process. Kinetic studies for the pharmaceutical degradation and the conversion of organic matter showed good adjustments to the pseudo first-order models with R 2 raging from 0.9705 to 0.9980. Toxicity assays for the before treatment solution indicated that the seeds Lactuca sativa and Portulaca grandiflora showed growth inhibition whereas the post-treatment solution inhibited only the growth of Lactuca sativa.