The ubiquity of pharmaceuticals and personal care products in water systems is well known. With the increasing implementation of water reuse schemes in the US, concern about potential health effects of these compounds in humans has risen. While potential synergistic effects of chronic low doses exposure to a cocktail of these compounds is still being studied, it is prudent to monitor and attenuate these trace organic compounds (TOrCs) from our water sources. This research initially focused on identifying suitable `indicator' TOrCs based on theoretical physico-chemical parameters and actual experimental data. It was concluded that an indicator list will be specific to the goal targeted with dependence on treatment process, occurrence and analytical ease. Quantification of these TOrCs are part per trillion levels in water requires accurate, precise and robust analytical techniques. The next part of this research was spent on developing three different analytical methods with LC-MS/MS for the sensitive detection of TOrCs in several different water matrices including raw sewage and final drinking water. The treatment efficacy of granular activated carbon for attenuation of TOrCs is studied in detail with emphasis on developing correlations between TOrC removal and bulk organic parameters of water like UV absorbance and fluorescence by using rapid small-scale column testing. The results indicate a correlation between removal of TOrCs and bulk organic parameters that is independent of water quality. The effectiveness of commercially available activated carbon based point-of-use (POU) devices for removal of a set of TOrCs from water was evaluated. The data indicated that POUs are a viable option for treatment of TOrCs but specific removal depends on type of device, water quality and amount of water treated. Finally, further research was targeted at identifying transformation products as a result of oxidation of polyfluorinated precursor materials in reclaimed waters. The results illustrated that toxic perfluorocarboxylic acids can be formed on oxidation of fluorotelomer unsaturated carboxylic acids that are known to be present in water.

The sorption of nonionic surfactant oxyethylated alcohols Lutensol AO – 10 and Cu (II) ions on activated carbon AquaSorb HS has been investigated. The kinetic investigations have revealed that the sorption of nonionic surfactant was the sufficiently slow process and required 7 days to reach equilibrium. The equilibrium sorption of the Cu (II) ions was attained within 24 h. ...

Produced water is one of the major by products of oil and gas exploitation which is produced in large amounts up to 80% of the waste stream. Oil and grease concentration in produced water is the key parameter that is used for compliance monitoring, because it is easy to measure. For Canadian offshore operations, the current standard is a 30-day volume weighted average oil-in-water concentration in discharged produced water not exceeding 30 mg/L. Treatment of produced water may therefore be required in order to meet pre-disposal regulatory limits. The measurement of oil in produced water is important for both process control and reporting to regulatory authorities. Without the specification of a method, reported concentrations of oil in produced water can mean little, as there are many techniques and methods available for making this measurement, but not all are suitable in a specific application. The first part of this study focused on selecting a suitable analytical method for oil and grease measurement in oil field produced water. Petroleum ether was found to offer a comparative dissolution of crude oil as dichloromethane and hexane; it was therefore used as the solvent of choice for the UV-Vis spectrophotometric analysis of oil and grease in synthetic produced water. Results from the UV-Vis spectrophotometric and FTIR spectrometric analytical methods were found to be comparable; it confirmed that UV-Vis spectrometry could potentially serve as an alternative method for measuring oil and grease in oil field produced water. However, while the UV-Vis method may have limitations in measuring oil and grease concentrations below 30 mg/L, the FT-IR method was found to be equally efficient at measuring both high and low oil and grease concentrations. Dissolved air flotation (DAF) was the primary treatment technology investigated in this study for removing oil and grease from synthetic produced water. By itself, DAF achieved less than 70% oil and grease (OG) removal, and was not able to achieve a clarified effluent OG concentration of 30 mg/L required for regulatory discharge limits. At an optimum condition of 20 mg/L ferric chloride (FeCl3) at pH 8 (70.6% OG removal), coagulation was found to significantly improve the performance of the DAF unit (p < 0.05). At the optimum conditions of 100 mg/L PAC dose, pH 8 and a mixing time of 10 minutes (77.5% OG removal) and 300 mg/L OC dose, pH 8 and a mixing time of 10 minutes (78.1% OG removal), adsorption was also found to significantly improve the performance of the DAF unit (p < 0.05 in both cases). Adsorption with organoclay was recommended as the best pre-treatment for optimizing the performance of DAF in removing oil and grease from offshore oil field produced water. The bench-scale experiments showed that turbidity removal results were consistent with the OG removal results. Without pre-treatment, DAF achieved significant removal of benzene from produced water due to the volatile nature of benzene. Therefore comparable levels of benzene removal was observed by the DAF, FeCl3/DAF, PAC/DAF and OC/DAF treatment schemes; 79.3 %, 86.6 %, 86.5 %, 83.5% respectively. Finally, as benzene is known to be carcinogenic to humans, this study recommends the incorporation auxiliary equipment in its design, for the treatment of the off-gas (VOCs, particularly BTEX) released during the removal of dissolved oil from the oil field produced water.

No description available.

The ability of six types of granular activated carbon (GAC) to quench H2O2 was evaluated by bench-scale H2O2 decomposition kinetics tests and pilot-scale H2O2 breakthrough tests. Bench-scale studies showed that carbon ageing significantly reduced the performance of H2O2 quenching by the GAC, but that the greatest impacts occurred within the first 25 000 bed volumes of water treated, with performance tending to stabilize afterwards. Pilot-scale studies suggested that both H2O2 exposure and exposure to natural organic matter were important factors in GAC ageing, with exposure to oxygen also suspected of being important. A continuously stirred tank reactor (CSTR)-in-series model was proposed for the prediction of H2O2 breakthrough in a GAC column.

The ability of six types of granular activated carbon (GAC) to quench H2O2 was evaluated by bench-scale H2O2 decomposition kinetics tests and pilot-scale H2O2 breakthrough tests. Bench-scale studies showed that carbon ageing significantly reduced the performance of H2O2 quenching by the GAC, but that the greatest impacts occurred within the first 25 000 bed volumes of water treated, with performance tending to stabilize afterwards. Pilot-scale studies suggested that both H2O2 exposure and exposure to natural organic matter were important factors in GAC ageing, with exposure to oxygen also suspected of being important. A continuously stirred tank reactor (CSTR)-in-series model was proposed for the prediction of H2O2 breakthrough in a GAC column.

Nitrosamines have garnered increasing attention from researchers and policy makers in recent years due to potential human health implications associated with their unintentional formation in water and wastewater treatment facilities. This work addresses a crucial nitrosamine formation pathway concerning the catalysis of amine nitrosation by activated carbon materials whose use is widespread in municipal and industrial systems. Experimental results show that this catalysis is highly pH dependent, with maximum formation achieved near the pKa value for each of the secondary amines tested. This result suggests that the overall formation potential is governed by individual amine properties and their interactions with carbon surfaces, rather than solely nitrite speciation as previously reported. Formation of the most commonly studied nitrosamine, N-nitrosodimethylamine, was shown to be highly dependent on initial dimethylamine (DMA) solution concentration, with yields of approximately 0.11% of the spiked secondary amine at pH 7.5. Morpholine and dibutylamine, larger and bulkier secondary amines, formed their corresponding nitrosamines at higher yields than DMA (0.21% and 1.69%, respectively). Additionally, select tertiary amines were shown to be capable of undergoing nitrosation on the same order of magnitude as the secondary amines under neutral conditions in the presence of activated carbons. The magnitude of these results indicates that greater attention should be paid to this previously overlooked mechanism for nitrosamine formation.

Porous zeolite, carbon and aluminophosphate powders have been colloidally assembled and post-processed in the form of monoliths, flexible free standing films and coatings for gas separation and odor removal. Zeolite 13X monoliths with macroporosites up to 50 vol% and a high CO2 uptake were prepared by colloidal processing and sacrificial templating. The durability of silicalite-I supports produced in a binder-free form by pulsed current processing (PCP) were compared with silicalite-I supports produced using clay-binders and conventional thermal treatment. Long-term acid and alkali treatment of the silicalite-I substrates resulted in removal of the clay binder and broadened the size-distribution of the interparticle macropores. Furthermore, strong discs of hydrothermally treated beer waste (HTC-BW) were produced by PCP and the discs were activated by physical activation in CO2 at high temperatures. The activated carbon discs showed high strength up to 7.2 MPa while containing large volume of porosities at all length scales. PCP was further used to structure aluminomphosphate powders (AlPO4-17 and AlPO4-53) into strong functional monoliths. The aluminophosphate monoliths had strengths of 1 MPa, high CO2 uptake and were easy to regenerate. Zeolite Y, silicalite and ZSM5 were selected as potential zeolite adsorbents for removal of sulfur containing compound, e.g. ethyl mercaptan (EM) and propyl mercaptan (PM). A novel processing procedure was used to fabricate free-standing films and coatings of cellulose nanofibrils (CNF) with a high content of nanoporous zeolite; 89 w/w% and 96 w/w%, respectively. Thin flexible free-standing films and coatings of zeolite-CNF on paperboards with thickness around 100 µm and 40 µm, respectively, were produced. Headspace solid phase microextraction (SPME) coupled to gas chromatography- mass spectroscopy (GC/MS) analysis showed that the zeolite-CNF films can efficiently remove considerable amount of odors below concentration levels that can be sensed by the human olfactory system. / <p>At the time of the doctoral defense, the following paper was unpublished and had a status as follows: Paper 5: Manuscript.</p>

Perfluoroalkylated substances (PFASs) are a group of synthetic compounds that have gained growing attention due to their environmental persistence, toxicity and their potential to bioaccumulate. Even though PFASs are not occurring naturally in our environment, they are globally distributed and can be found ubiquitously in air, water, soil, wildlife as well as in humans. PFASs have primarily been used, due to their unique properties of being both hydrophilic and hydrophobic, as surfactants in numerous products such as firefighting foams, paint, leather and textile coating. The occurrence of PFASs in drinking water as well as in wastewater makes it important to develop effective techniques to remove these compounds from drinking water sources and wastewater. To be able to effectively remove PFASs from drinking water and wastewater it is important to understand which treatment process is most efficient and how the removal efficiency is affected by the physicochemical properties of PFASs and characteristics of water. In this study, the removal efficiency of PFASs was investigated using six different water types with varying dissolved organic carbon (DOC) character. Four different treatment techniques were evaluated including anion exchange using MIEX® resins, coagulation with iron (III) chloride (FeCl3), adsorption using powdered activated carbon (PAC) and nanofiltration (NF) membrane. The batch experiments were performed in laboratory-scale for 14 individual PFASs including C3-11, C13 perfluoroalkyl carboxylic acids (PFCAs), C4, C6, C8 perfluoroalkyl sulfonic acids (PFSAs) and perfluorooctane sulfonamide (FOSA). The results showed that the removal efficiency of PFASs was dependent on both perfluorocarbon chain length as well as functional group, with an increase in removal efficiency with increased perfluorocarbon chain length. Short-chained PFASs (C!6) were removed in less extent than the long chained PFASs for all treatment techniques. Amongst the four treatment techniques investigated, NF membrane exhibited the best removal efficiency for both short- and long chained PFASs (on average, 51%). Lower removal efficiencies for PFASs were observed for MIEX (33%) &lt; FeCl3 (16%) &lt; PAC (14%). However, all tested treatment techniques used in this study exhibited generally low removal efficiency (&lt; 78%), in particular for the short-chained PFASs (C!6, &lt; 41%) Results using three different doses of PAC (i.e. 20, 50, 100 mg L-1) showed an increase in removal (i.e. 2.2-41%, 8.0-78% and 12-92% respectively) with increasing dose. No significant trends were found between PFAS removal and DOC removal for any of the treatments (p&lt;0.05, student t-test). However, the removal efficiency was different of the six different water types, which indicates that the DOC characteristics (i.e. Freshness, humification index, pH and absorbance) have an influence on the removal efficiency of PFASs in water. / Perfluoroalkylerade ämnen (PFASer) är en grupp syntetiska ämnen som har fått allt större uppmärksamhet den senaste tiden då de har visat sig vara persistenta, toxiska och bioackumulerande. Även om PFASer inte förekommer naturligt i vår miljö är de globalt fördelade och kan återfinnas i luft, vatten, mark, djur och hos människor. PFASer har främst använts, på grund av sina unika egenskaper att vara både hydrofila och hydrofoba, som tensider i många produkter såsom brandsläckningsskum, färg, läder och textil. Förekomsten av PFASer i dricksvattentäkter och i många reningsverk gör det viktigt att utveckla effektiva metoder för att ta bort dessa föreningar i vattenreningsverk. För att effektivt kunna avlägsna PFASer från dricks- och avloppsvatten är det viktigt att ha kunskap om vilken behandlingsmetod som är effektivast och hur reningseffektiviteten påverkas av ämnenas fysikalisk-kemiska egenskaper och vattnets karaktär.   Syftet med denna studie var att undersökta reningseffektiviteten för PFASer i sex olika vatten innehållande olika typer av löst organiskt kol (DOC). Detta undersöktes för fyra olika behandlingsteknikert; jonbyte med MIEX®, koagulering med järnklorid (FeCl3), adsorption med hjälp av pulveriserat aktivt kol (PAC) och nanofiltrering. Försöken gjordes små skaligt i laboratorie och 14 olika PFASer undersöktes; C3-11,13  perfluoralkyl karboxylsyror (PFCAer), C4, C6, C8, perfluoralkyl sulfonsyror (PFSAer) och perfluoroktan sulfonamid (FOSA). Resultaten visar att reningseffektiviteten för PFASer var beroende av både den perfluorerade kolkedjans längd och funktionell grupp, med en ökning av reningseffektivitet med längre perfluorerad kolkedja. PFASer med kort perfluorerad kolkedja (C≤6) renades i mindre utsträckning än PFASer med lång perfluorerad kolkedjade; detta gällde för alla behandlingstekniker. Bland de fyra behandlingstekniker som undersöktes uppvisade nanofiltreringen den bästa reningseffektiviteten för PFASer med både korta och långa kolkedjor (i genomsnitt, 51%.). Lägre reningseffektivitet för PFASer observerades för MIEX®(33%), &lt; FeCl3(16%) &lt; PAC (14%). Totalt sett erhölls en relativt låg reningseffektivitet (&lt;78%) för samtliga reningstekniker, speciellt för de kortkedjade PFASer (C£6, &lt; 41%). Resultat från försök med tre olika doser PAC (e.g. 20, 50, 100 mg L-1) visade på en ökad reningseffektivitet (2,2-41%, 8,0-78% och 12-92%) med ökad dos PAC. Inga signifikanta trender kunde urskiljas vad gäller reningseffektivitet av PFASer och rening av DOC (p&lt;0.05, student t-test), detta gällde för samtliga behandlingstekniker. Det fanns dock tydliga skillnader i reningseffektivitet mellan de sex olika vattentyperna vilket indikerar på att DOC egenskaperna (Freshnessindex, humifieringsindex, pH, absorbans) har en påverkan på reningseffektiviteten för PFASer i vatten.

Photocatalysis is an advanced oxidation process for the purification and remediation of contaminated waters and wastewaters, and is advantageous over conventional treatment technologies due to its ability to degrade emerging and recalcitrant pollutants. In addition, photocatalytic disinfection is less chemical-intensive than other methods such as chlorination, and can inactivate even highly resistant microorganisms with good efficacy. Process sustainability and cost-effectiveness may be improved by utilizing solar irradiation as the source of necessary photons for photocatalyst excitation. However, solar-induced activity of the traditionally-used titania is poor due to its inefficient visible light absorption, and recombination of photo-excited species is problematic. Additionally, mass transfer limitations and difficulties separating the catalyst from the post-treatment slurry hinder conversions and efficiencies obtainable in practice. In this research, various strategies were explored to address these issues using novel visible light active photocatalysts. Two classes of carbon-enhanced photocatalytic materials were studied: activated carbon adsorbent photocatalyst composites, and carbon-doped TiO2. Adsorbent photocatalyst composites based on activated carbon and plasmonic silver/silver chloride structures were synthesized, characterized, and experimentally investigated for their photocatalytic activity towards the degradation of model organic pollutants (methyl orange dye, phenol) and the inactivation of a model microorganism (Escherichia coli K-12) under visible light. The adsorptive behaviour of the composites towards methyl orange dye was also studied and described according to appropriate models. Photocatalytic bacterial inactivation induced by the prepared composites was investigated, and the inactivation mechanisms and roles of incorporated antimicrobial silver on disinfection were probed and discussed. These composites were extended towards magnetic removal strategies for post-use separation through the incorporation of magnetic nanoparticles to prepare Ag/AgCl-magnetic activated carbon composites, and the effect of nanoparticles addition on the properties and photoactivities of the resulting materials was explored. Another silver/silver halide adsorbent photocatalyst composite based on activated carbon and Ag/AgBr exhibiting visible light absorption due to both localized surface plasmon resonance and optical band gap absorption was synthesized and its photocatalytic activity towards organics degradation and microbial inactivation was studied. Carbon-doped mixed-phase titania was also prepared and experimentally investigated.