The degradation of sulfamilamide wastewater by three-dimensional electrocatalytic oxidation system composed of activated carbon bimetallic particle electrode

Antibiotics remaining in wastewater can lead to serious environmental problems, such as bacterial drug resistance and biological toxicity. Electrocatalytic oxidation is becoming an effective method to degrade antibiotics. In this study, we simply synthesized bimetallic oxide activated carbon particle electrode (GAC-Co-Mn) by impregnation method and designed a bench-scale electrocatalytic reaction tank for the first time. Then, a three-dimensional electrocatalytic oxidation system composed of GAC-Co-Mn particle electrode and electrocatalytic reaction tank was used to degrade sulfanilamide antibiotic wastewater. The removal efficiency and mechanism of sulfanilamide (SA) were studied by UV spectrophotometry and ultra-performance liquid chromatography/triple quadrupole mass spectrometry. TOC-L analyzer was used to determine the contents of total organic carbon (TOC) and total nitrogen (TN) of SA wastewater before and after degradation. Electron paramagnetic resonance spectroscopy was used to confirm the production of hydroxyl radicals (•OH). The electrocatalytic activity of the materials was investigated by electrochemical workstation. In addition, we found that this three-dimensional electrocatalytic oxidation system not only has good degradation efficiency for SA, but also has good degradation efficiency for 2,4-dinitrophenol, p-nitroaniline and p-aminobenzenesulfonic acid. Moreover, GAC-Co-Mn still has good degradation efficiency after 6 cycles, indicating that GAC-Co-Mn has good structural stability. Therefore, we believe that the method has good application potential in the field of water treatment.