The occurrence of pharmaceutical compounds in wastewater has become a major concern for human health and the environment. Therefore, it is an important challenge to improve conventional wastewater treatment to remove these compounds. Coupling biological treatment with advanced oxidation technology has been widely studied in the literature, but only sequential associations of the two processes have been used. This study proposes an innovative concept based on a real integration of the photocatalytic oxidation process in a continuous recycling loop on a membrane bioreactor. The role of the oxidation here is not to completely degrade pharmaceuticals, but instead to oxidize them moderately to increase their biodegradability so that they can be eliminated by the biological process.

中文翻译：

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迈向结合生物降解和光氧化的创新组合工艺以去除药物残留

废水中药物化合物的存在已成为人类健康和环境的主要问题。因此，改进常规废水处理以除去这些化合物是一个重要的挑战。在文献中已广泛研究了将生物处理与先进的氧化技术耦合，但是仅使用了这两个过程的顺序关联。这项研究提出了一个创新的概念，它基于光催化氧化过程在膜生物反应器上连续循环回路中的真正整合。这里的氧化作用不是完全降解药物，而是适度地氧化它们以提高其生物降解性，以便可以通过生物过程将其消除。