Sequestration of Paracetamol from Aqueous Solution Using Zinc Oxide/Polypyrrole Nanocomposite: Cost Analysis, Scale-Up Design, and Optimization of Process Parameters

Abstract

The production of pharmaceuticals in recent years has been racing to its peak due to the advancement of society that has led to a rise in a variety of diseases. Thus, disposal of these untreated pharmaceutical products coming from hospital wastewater and medicine manufacturing plants to the water system is causing a serious environmental threat. Therefore, this work mainly focuses on the removal of one of the widely used pharmaceuticals (e.g., paracetamol) with the help of adsorption technology from water using a metal oxide-based polymer, that is, zinc oxide/polypyrrole (ZnO/PPy). The fabricated adsorbent was characterized with X-ray diffraction, field emission gun–scanning electron microscopy, energy-dispersive X-ray spectroscopy, Fourier transform infrared spectroscopy, and Brunauer–Emmett–Teller analysis to identify its crystal formation, morphology, effective functional groups, and surface area, respectively. A pseudo-second-order kinetic model better suits this adsorption study compared with the pseudo-first-order and intraparticle diffusion model. Langmuir isotherm model fits better and provided a paracetamol adsorption capacity of 25.51 mg/g for ZnO/PPy. Monovalent anions (e.g., Cl−,