A crucial issue in domestic water treatment is the emergence of emerging growing class of pollutants that are especially difficult to treat via traditional physical, chemical, and biological water treatment technologies. This class includes pharmaceutical products, personal care products, endocrine-disruptors, and other emerging contaminants. Advanced oxidation/reduction process (AOP) transformations of these materials are a viable treatment alternative that allows targeting of specific organic pollutants for removal prior to release or reuse of treated water. Traditional approaches include UV treatment, UV combined with peroxide, and ozone oxidation. Many other methods (e.g., Fenton, photo-Fenton, photocatalysts) have shown great promise at the bench scale, but their relative effectiveness in real treatment trains is difficult to assess. To achieve viable technology transfer, the scientific studies in journals need to feed into pilot-scale and full-scale studies; and that cannot happen without well-established metrics and means of comparison.  To address this problem, we have tested several catalytic AOP materials that can effectively remove recalcitrant and emerging contaminants and micropollutants from a treated wastewater effluent stream, enabling the water to be reused as potable fresh water. In particular, we examined metal oxide catalysts, Fenton and photo-Fenton processes, and compared them to UV and ozone methods, applied with peroxide or hypochlorite. We monitored reaction kinetics for the degradation of model and actual pollutants from spiked water samples. With these results, we performed engineering and cost analyses by considering the material, chemical, and energy inputs for AOP activation and subsequent removal/inactivation to arrive at a normalized metric by which to compare the various methods. The goal of this research is to validate and compare the effectiveness of AOP technologies to degrade and eliminate organic chemical contaminants so that their use in wastewater treatment trains can be realized.

Cross comparison of advanced oxidation processes (AOPs) for remediation of organic pollutants in water treatment systems

256th National Meeting (2018)

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