Phenolic aldehydes are widespread pollutants found in air, water, and soil systemsas they originate from industrial,residential burnings, forest fires, volcanic ash, and vehicle exhaust. As the general trend of the Anthropocene shows pollution increase, it is of primary concern to improve water treatment systems to degrade phenolic aldehydes into less hazardous compounds. Over the past two decades, ozonolysis has become a wide spread treatment method, which found large scale applications within the United States. However, the detailed understanding of the ozonolysis of phenolic aldehydes in water is far from complete. Thus, in this work we study the degradative ozonolysis of three model phenolic aldehydes in water, which yields a common mechanism of production of smaller and less toxic molecules resulting in enhanced water quality. Experimental work was carried out with 1 mM solution of a selected phenolic aldehyde at pH 8, 6, and 4, which was exposed to a flow of 1 L/min of 1000 ppmv ozone gas for 3 hours.Colorimetric analysis was used to monitor the dissolved ozone concentration in the sparged reactor.The reactant and degradation products were monitored by UV-visible (UV-vis) spectroscopy, ultra-high pressure liquid chromatography(UHPLC) with UV-vis and mass spectrometry (MS) detection, and ion chromatography (IC) with conductivity and MS detection. As a result of the ozonolysis an abundance of secondary organic compounds was formed, including oxalic acid, glycolic acid, formic acid, and maleic acid. The quantification of the previous productsand the identification of intermediate products under a range of reaction conditions reveal a deeper mechanistic understanding of ozonolysis and serves to evaluate its implementation inscaled upwater treatment.

Ozonolysis of phenolic aldehydes in water

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