Persulphate activation under UV radiation for cyclophosphamide degradation and mineralisation in aqueous solution

Hospital wastewater is mainly a source of pharmaceutical compounds entering water resources. The presence of the residual pharmaceutical compounds, due to the inability of the conventional treatment processes, will lead to the introduction of these compounds into the environment and therefore will have its own environmental and health effects. In the present study, the degradation and mineralisation of cyclophosphamide from aqueous solution was investigated using the UV/Persulphate process and the effect of variables such as pH, persulphate concentration, reaction time, cyclophosphamide concentration, and mineralisation rate of cyclophosphamide were evaluated and compared with similar studies. The results of the study show that the pH of the process does not have much effect on the performance of the UV/Persulphate process and based on the results, the neutral pH was selected as the optimum pH. The concentration of 300 mg/L of persulphate was also obtained as the optimum concentration of persulphate. The kinetic analysis of decomposition also shows that the cyclophosphamide decomposition follows a pseudo-first-order kinetic model. Also, the study of the mineralisation rate of cyclophosphamide shows that the UV/Persulphate process can complete the mineralisation of 50 mg/L cyclophosphamide within 210 min. Finally, according to the results, it can be concluded that the UV/Persulphate process can be an effective and promising process for the degradation and mineralisation of cyclophosphamide.