The present water crisis is probable to grow worse in the coming decades and this has motivated the scientific community to identify innovative, safe, and robust water treatment technologies at lower cost and with less energy, diminishing the use of chemicals and impact on the environment. Usually, conventional approaches for treating water and wastewaters can reasonably solve this problem; nevertheless, these methods are frequently chemically, energetically, and operationally intensive. Therefore, the development of other techno-eco-alternatives has been stimulated the science and technology.<br/>Over the last decades, several research groups around the world have been done significant efforts in order to preferably develop electrochemical-based technologies to conventional water and wastewater treatment methods (Fig. 1). Electrochemical processes have emerged as environment-friendly approaches and sustainable technologies which offer a different solution to many environmental problems because are versatile, efficient, cost-effective, easily automatable, and the electrons are a clean reagent (inexpensive and suitable reagent to drive the decontamination), avoiding conventional chemical oxidizers or reducing agents.<br/>Diamond films emerge as a novel and sustainable solution to electrogenerate powerful oxidants for water and wastewaters treatments. The overarching goal of this communication is to evidence the importance of diamond electrochemical methods as alternative in different experimental cases. The fundamentals and applications of electrochemical approaches with diamond to treat synthetic and real waters and wastewaters will be presented and discussed. The use of hybrid and sequential processes involving electrochemical oxidation with other techniques are also analyzed as well as the use diamond-nanostructured materials to provide new substrates and catalysts for improving reactive oxygen species production in electrochemical treatments will be presented. A section remarking the future challenges of diamond technologies will be finally presented.

Environment-friendly electrochemical processes for water and wastewater treatment

ACS Fall 2021

The official archive and repository for all ACS Meetings & Expositions abstracts and select posters or presentations.