Degradation of Amoxicillin by Bacterial Consortium in a Submerged Biological Aerated Filter: Volumetric Removal Modeling

Background: amoxicillin is widely used as an antibiotic in themodern medicine. due to its chemical structure, polarity, activitylevel, antibiotic specifications, and environmental sustainability,amoxicillin leaks into the groundwater, surface waters, anddrinking water wells. many physical and chemical methodshave been suggested for removing amoxicillin from aquaticenvironments. however, these methods are so costly and havemany performance problems.methods: in this study, biodegradation of amoxicillin bysubmerged biological aerated filter (sbaf) was evaluated inthe aquatic environment. in order to assess the removal ofamoxicillin from the aquatic environment, this bioreactor wasfed with synthetic wastewater based on sucrose and amoxicillinat 3 concentration levels and 4 hydraulic retention times (hrts).results: the maximum efficiency for amoxicillin and solublechemical oxygen demand (scod) removal was 50.8% and45.3%, respectively. the study findings showed that stover-kincannon model had very good fitness in loading amoxicillinin the biofilter (r2 > 9 9%). t here w as n o a ccumulation o famoxicillin in the biofilm and the loss of amoxicillin in thecontrol reactor was negligible. this shows that removal ofamoxicillin from the system was due to biodegradation.conclusions: it can be concluded that there was no significantinhibition effect on mixed aerobic microbial consortia. it wasalso observed that amoxicillin degradation was dependent onthe amount of amoxicillin in the influent and by increasing theinitial amoxicillin concentration, amoxicillin biodegradationincreased, as well.