In the past few years, the contamination by pesticides and heavy metals in surface water and groundwater has increased. Reverse osmosis is a unit process that has demonstrated capacity to remove dissolved pesticides and heavy metals from aqueous solution, and it is therefore worthwhile to consider this treatment process as a potential removal technique for hazardous constituents.
The purpose of this investigation was to determine the effectiveness of a field scale reverse osmosis unit, with a spiral wound poly(ether/urea) membrane, in removing pesticides and heavy metals from a contaminated source. The removal efficiency for a single contaminant alone and a part of a mixture was examined. The performance of new and used membranes over time was also investigated.
The average removal of pesticides was better than 99 percent. Reverse osmosis separation of pesticides was found to be dependent on the characteristics of the membrane and the physical/chemical properties of the pesticides. Pesticides in the mixed solution were found to behave independently. Sorption of the pesticides onto the reverse osmosis membrane was found to play a major role in the overall removal efficiency.
Better than 99 percent average removal was achieved for all the metals except arsenic. The importance of the physical/chemical properties of the metal ions such as solubility, ionic radius, and electronegativity were determined. In tests to compare removal efficiency between new membrane and membrane which had been used, virtually no differences occurred. / Master of Science
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:VTETD/oai:vtechworks.lib.vt.edu:10919/42126 |
| Date | 18 April 2009 |
| Creators | Chong, Brian S. H. |
| Contributors | Environmental Engineering, Ludwig, Daniel D., Dietrich, Andrea M., Sherrard, Joseph H. |
| Publisher | Virginia Tech |
| Source Sets | Virginia Tech Theses and Dissertation |
| Language | English |
| Detected Language | English |
| Type | Thesis, Text |
| Format | x, 112 leaves, BTD, application/pdf, application/pdf |
| Rights | In Copyright, http://rightsstatements.org/vocab/InC/1.0/ |
| Relation | OCLC# 21741530, LD5655.V855_1990.C465.pdf |
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