Perfluorinated compounds (PFCs), a new class of globally identified organic pollutants, have attracted great concerns not only due to their occurrence in humans and wildlife, their extreme environmental persistence and their oxidative recalcitrance but also the lack of treatment technologies for their efficient removal. As a potential development of treatment method for PFCs in aqueous solution, chemisorption of PFCs on powdered activated carbon (PAC) initiated by oxidant free radicals generated from Fenton's reactions, persulfate activation or permanganate oxidation was discovered and investigated in this study. PAC was applied as a catalyst for oxidant radical generation as well as an active site of chemisorption for stable chemical bond formation in its structure initialed by radicals. To study the fate of PFCs during chemisorption removal and oxidation, homogeneous control experiments and heterogeneous treatment experiments were performed under acidic, neutral and basic conditions. Although PAC made obvious enhancements on oxidant radical generation in all reaction systems, the fate of PFCs was enormously impacted by the presence and absence of PAC and the pH conditions. Only under extremely acidic conditions in both homogeneous and heterogeneous systems, PFCs were oxidized and transformed to product PFCs with partial mineralization. Under neutral conditions, PFCs were removed by chemisorption on PAC only in heterogeneous system, but not in the homogeneous system. Under basic conditions, PFCs were not destroyed or chemisorbed in the homogeneous or heterogeneous systems, so basic pH conditions are invalid for PFC treatment.

Chemisorption of perfluorinated compounds on activated carbon initiated by oxidant free radicals

248th National Meeting (2014)

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