Evaluating tetracycline degradation pathway and intermediate toxicity during the electrochemical oxidation over a Ti/Ti4O7 anode

By Wang, Jianbing; Zhi, Dan; Zhou, Hao; He, Xuwen; Zhang, Dayi
Published in Water Research 2018

Abstract

Tetracycline (TC) is one of the most widely used antibiotics with significant impacts on human health and thus it needs appropriate approaches for its removal. In the present study, we evaluated the performance and complete pathway of the TC electrochemical oxidation on a Ti/Ti4O7 anode prepared by plasma spraying. Morphological data and composition analysis indicated a compact coating layer on the anode, which had the characteristic peaks of Ti4O7 as active constituent. The TC electrochemical oxidation on the Ti/Ti4O7 anode followed a pseudo-first-order kinetics, and the TC removal efficiency reached 95.8% in 40 min. The influential factors on TC decay kinetics included current density, anode-cathode distance and initial TC concentration. This anode also had high durability and the TC removal efficiency was maintained over 95% after five times reuse. For the first time, we unraveled the complete pathway of the TC electrochemical oxidation using high-performance liquid chromatograph (HPLC) and gas chromatograph (GC) coupled with mass spectrometer (MS).

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