Kinetic Analysis of pH Effect on the Paracetamol Degradation by an Ozonation–Blast Furnace Slags Coupled System by Neural Network Approximation

The presence of paracetamol (PCT) in aquatic environments has raised environmental concerns due to its incomplete removal in conventional wastewater treatment plants. This study evaluates the degradation kinetics of PCT using an ozonation system enhanced with blast furnace slags (BFSs) as a heterogeneous catalyst under acidic (pH 3), neutral (pH 7), and basic (pH 10) conditions. Experimental results show that a simple ozonation process achieves up to 85% PCT removal within 30 min, with the highest rates being observed at pH 10. The addition of BFSs increases the reaction rate constants by 20–30% across all pH levels, attributed to the catalytic activity of metallic oxides in BFSs, which promote radical-based degradation pathways. Biochemical oxygen demand (BOD5) and HPLC analyses confirm a significant reduction in PCT and its byproducts, while ozone consumption is optimized in the catalytic system. A hybrid kinetic modeling approach, integrating pseudo-first-order kinetics and a long short-term memory (LSTM) neural network, was developed and validated, demonstrating superior predictive accuracy (R2 > 0.98) for PCT degradation dynamics compared with traditional models.