Next-generation hybrid technologies for the treatment of pharmaceutical industry effluents.

Water and industries are intangible units of the globe that are always set to meet the population's demand. The global population depends on one-third of freshwater increasing the demand. The increase in population along with urbanization has polluted the fresh water resources. The pharmaceutical industry is marked as an emerging contaminant of water pollution. The most common type of pharmaceutical drugs that are detected in the environment includes antibiotics, analgesics, NSAIDs, and pain-relieving drugs. These drugs alter the food chain of the organisms causing chaos mainly in the marine ecosystem. Pharmaceutical drugs are found only in shallow amounts (ng/mg) they have a huge impact on the living system. The consumption of water contaminated with pharmaceutical ingredients can disrupt reproduction, hormonal imbalance, cancer, and respiratory problems. Various methods are used to remove these chemicals from the environment. In this review, we mainly focused on the emerging hybrid technologies and their significance in the effective treatment of pharmaceutical wastewater. This review paper primarily elaborates on the merits and demerits of existing conventional technologies helpful in developing integrated technologies for the modern era of pharmaceutical effluent treatment. This review paper further in detail discusses the various strategies of eco-friendly bioremediation techniques namely biostimulation, bioaugmentation, bacterial degradation, mycoremediation, phytoremediation, and others for the ultimate removal of pharmaceutical contaminants in wastewater. The review makes clear that targeted and hybrid solutions are what the world will require in the future to get rid of these pharmacological prints.

Safety evaluation of horizontal curves on two lane rural highways using machine learning algorithms: A priority-based study for sight distance improvements.

OBJECTIVE: Current Road geometric design processes disregard stochastic aspects, resulting in inadequate traffic safety considerations. In addition, the primary sources of crash data are obtained from police department, insurance agency and hospitals, where detailed investigation is not carried out from a transportation perspective. So, the data obtained from these sources may or may not be reliable. The main objective of this study is to account uncertainties using reliability as a tool that considers slow down the vehicle while they maneuver the curve and to develop thresholds of reliability index associated with sight distance based on operating speed design consistent measure as a surrogate safety measure rather than using crash data. METHODOLOGY: This study proposes a thresholds of reliability index associated with sight distance for various operating speed ranges based on design consistent measure. In addition, established the relationship between the consistency levels, geometric characteristics and vehicle characteristics. In this study, classical topography survey was carried out on the field using total station. The data collected comprises speed data and geometric data of 18 horizontal curves (Lane based analysis was carried out). A total of 3042 free flowing vehicle speeds have been extracted from the video graphic survey and used in the analysis. RESULTS: The threshold values of reliability indices associated with sight distance is higher as the operating speed increases for the section to be a consistent design section. The results from the Binary Logit Model show that the consistency level is significantly affected by deflection angle and operating speed. Deflection angle was negatively correlated with the in-consistency level, and the operating speed was positively correlated with in-consistency level. CONCLUSIONS: From Binary Logit Model (BLM) results, we can conclude that an increase in the value of deflection angle will significantly decrease the probability of In-Consistent level, which indicates uncertainties that cause drivers to change the path of vehicle or rate of deceleration of the vehicle while maneuvering the curve will be decreased. Whereas, increase in the operating speed will significantly increase the probability of In-Consistency level.