Sonocatalytic degradation of antibiotics by nanoparticles

Nowadays, the presence of antibiotics in the environment has increasingly caused concern. Antibiotic contamination in the environment leads to the formation of antibiotic-resistant genes and antibiotic-resistant bacteria. The discharge of hospital, industrial, agricultural and local wastewater is the main route of antibiotic entry into the environment. Studies show that the conventional water treatment processes are not efficient and specifically designed to remove these polar compounds, which are mostly water-soluble, non-volatile and non-biodegradable. To destroy these pollutions, many researchers have paid attention to various technologies based on abundant sources and clean energy, such as photocatalysis, Photo-Fenton, UV-H2O2, ozonation, sonolysis and sonocatalysis. Although the contaminated water is very turbid and obscure in many areas that light can hardly penetrate into the contaminated water and limits the photocatalytic ability. Semiconductor-based sonocatalysis has many advantages in antibiotic removal applications. Because the ultrasound waves can spread well in any aqueous environment and play a sonocatalytic effect. The effectiveness of photocatalytic and sonocatalytic processes is related to factors such as irradiation time, photocatalyst dose, pH, etc. Semiconductors such as TiO2, ZnO, SnO2, and ZrO2 participate in sonocatalytic processes due to their ability to promote the valence band electron to the conduction band, leaving the hole behind, and produce free radicals for the oxidation of organic compounds. In this article, we try to provide an overview of the sonocatalytic applications of nanoparticles in the degradation of antibiotics.