Surfactant-Activated pharmaceutical waste biomass for efficient removal of Basic Violet 14: Experimental Investigation, Machine-Learning Optimization, and mechanistic validation by DFT calculations.
Othmani A, Hammouche I, Selatnia A, Bouchelkia N
Wastewater Treatment
Pharmaceutical dyes that escape into rivers and irrigation canals are taken up by the vegetables and garden plants you eat, so cleaner industrial wastewater directly reduces what ends up on your plate.
Scientists took leftover bacteria from antibiotic manufacturing — material that would normally be thrown away — and coated it with a soap-like chemical to make it much better at pulling a toxic purple dye out of contaminated water. The treated waste material cleaned water twice as efficiently as the untreated version, needing half as much material to do the same job. They also trained computer models to predict the best conditions for the cleanup, making the whole process smarter and more practical.
Key Findings
SDS-modified bacterial biomass achieved ~98% dye removal at 2 g/L, compared to 4 g/L required for unmodified biomass to reach similar efficiency.
DFT quantum chemistry calculations showed the surfactant treatment nearly doubled adsorption energy (from -1.42 to -2.87 eV), explaining the mechanistic improvement.
An artificial neural network (ANN) outperformed linear regression, decision tree, and random forest models in predicting dye removal, and was coupled with genetic algorithm and particle swarm optimization to identify optimal operating conditions.
chevron_right Technical Summary
Researchers converted antibiotic-production waste — dead bacterial biomass — into a highly efficient filter for toxic dyes in pharmaceutical wastewater. Treating the biomass with a common surfactant (SDS) doubled its cleaning power, reaching ~98% dye removal at half the dose, with AI models used to optimize conditions.
Abstract Preview
Dyes are extensively employed in the pharmaceutical industry and laboratories and their persistence in wastewaters presents severe environmental and health hazards due to toxicity and resistance to...
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