Emma Lonson

The aqueous photolysis of 4-fluorophenol, and fluoxetine was studied using a solar simulator and environmentally relevant aqueous conditions. Fluorinated pharmaceuticals have been shown to be present in varying environments, including surface water, groundwater, and wastewater effluents. This makes it important to study how the fluorinated pharmaceuticals interact with different forms of environmentally relevant conditions including sunlight and nucleophiles. This study aims to understand how environmentally relevant photolysis conditions affect pharmaceutical and model compound degradation rates. Compounds were dissolved in aqueous matrices containing nucleophiles and subjected to a solar simulator. Parent molecule degradation was followed via UV-HPLC and modeled by pseudo first order kinetics until approximately 75% of the parent compound was degraded. For 4-fluorophenol all conditions degraded at similar rates with 10 mM thiosulfate decreasing the degradation rate. This is hypothesized to be due to light screening effects. The pharmaceutical fluoxetine experienced increased degradation rates in the presence of 1 mM hydroxide at pH 9 compared to Milli-Q water. Thiosulfate at 10 mM reduced the degradation rate of fluoxetine and followed the same trend at 4-fluorophenol. These results will help in understanding how organofluorine compounds will degrade in the environment.