Removal performance and mechanism of ibuprofen from water by catalytic ozonation using sludge-corncob activated carbon as catalyst.

To discover the catalytic activity of sludge-corncob activated carbon in catalytic ozonation of Ibuprofen, the performance of sludge-corncob activated carbon and three selected commercial activated carbons as catalysts in catalytic ozonation was investigated. The observation indicates the degradation rate of Ibuprofen increases significantly in the presence of sludge-corncob activated carbon and the catalytic activity of sludge-corncob activated carbon is much higher than that of the other three commercial activated carbons. Ibuprofen's removal rate follows pseudo-first order kinetics model well. It is also found that the adsorption removal of Ibuprofen by sludge-corncob activated carbon is less than 30% after 40 min. And the removal efficiency of Ibuprofen in the hybrid ozone/sludge-corncob activated carbon system is higher than the sum of sludge-corncob activated carbon adsorption and ozonation alone, which is a supportive evidence for catalytic reaction. In addition, the results of radical scavenger experiments demonstrate that catalytic ozonation of Ibuprofen by sludge-corncob activated carbon follows a hydroxyl radical reaction pathway. During ozonation of Ibuprofen in the presence of activated carbon, ozone could be catalytically decomposed to form hydrogen peroxide, which can promote the formation of hydroxyl radical. The maximum amount of hydrogen peroxide occurs in the presence of sludge-corncob activated carbon, which can explain why sludge-corncob activated carbon has the best catalytic activity among four different activated carbons.