The critical environmental issues urge advanced and green technologies for the purification of contaminated water systems due to the existence of diverse hazardous organic substances produced from human activities. As promising candidates, carbonaceous materials are green catalysts to replace the toxic transition/noble metal catalysts in environmental catalysis without concerns of secondary metal contamination. In this presentation, we will introduce our first application of nanocarbon materials in advanced oxidation processes (AOPs) and the discovery of a nonradical electron-transfer pathway (ETP). The ETP oxidation regime of carbon/persulfate systems is featured by the mild oxidation potential and high selectivity toward electron-rich micropollutants in complicated water matrixes. The kinetics, redox capacity and radical/nonradical pathway can be fine-tuned by chemical and structure engineering of the carbocatalysts. More recently, we found that the nonradical AOPs systems can directly convert organic pollutants (e.g., phenolics) into organic polymers for upgrading. Such a process significantly reduces persulfate consumption and effectively mitigates carbon emissions in water treatment toward a circular water economy.

Carbon-catalyzed nonradical advanced oxidation processes for organic wastewater purification

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