Fate of selected pharmaceutically active compounds in the integrated fixed film activated sludge process
Bibliographic record
Abstract
The potential for integrated fixed film activated sludge (IFAS) processes to achieve enhanced transformation of pharmaceuticals relative to conventional activated sludge (CAS) processes was assessed. Previous studies have focused on direct comparisons of parallel reactors with and without fixed film carriers and little information is available on the impacts of how varying operating parameters impact the differences in observed pharmaceutical compound (PC) transformation capabilities between CAS reactors and those equipped with both an activated sludge (AS) and fixed film carriers. The testing was carried out using bench scale sequencing batch reactors fed with authentic municipal wastewater and operated at selected combinations of temperature and solids retention time (SRT). PC transformation efficiencies were assessed in a 22 factorial design that employed the IFAS and CAS processes, operated in parallel under identical process conditions. Nitrification rate testing that was conducted to obtain insight into the biomass activity demonstrated that IFAS consistently had improved nitrification kinetics despite lower mixed liquor volatile suspended solids levels thereby demonstrating the contribution of the biofilm to nitrification. Increased transformation of atenolol (ATEN; ranging from 10–60%) and trimethoprim (TRIM; ranging from 30–50%) in the IFAS equipped reactors relative to their respective activated sludge (AS) controls was observed under all experimental conditions. Negligible transformation of carbamazepine was observed in both reactors under all conditions investigated. More than 99% of acetaminophen was transformed in both configurations under all conditions. There was no correspondence between nitrification activity and TRIM removal in the control AS while conditions that stimulated nitrification in the control AS also resulted in enhanced removal of ATEN. The results of this study indicate that the integration of biofilms in AS processes enhances transformation of some PCs.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.006 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Open science | 0.002 | 0.001 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".