Hmoudah, Maryam (2024) Innovative Materials for Water Purification. [Tesi di dottorato]

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Abstract

The insecure future of freshwater resources is undoubtedly a serious challenge for all living beings. Human activities generate harmful compounds or pollutants that should be treated before they are released into the aquatic ecosystems. The chaotic discharge of organic and inorganic compounds is considered a long-standing and aggravated global problem. Particularly, emerging contaminants, such as pharmaceutically active compounds (PhACs), personal care products, surfactants, various industrial additives, and endocrine-disrupting chemicals have proven to harm human health and ecological systems. Most of the current physical, chemical, and biological technologies used in wastewater treatment are prohibitively expensive they and face many operational challenges. Therefore, the development of economic, viable, and scalable techniques can profoundly secure access to safe and good drinking water quality. The advancement in the last two decades of wastewater purification methods including adsorption on non-conventional solids, advanced oxidation, and photodegradation is gaining massive attention. These technologies have many advantages, once compared to other treatment techniques, such as simplicity, cost feasibility, and the ease of operation including applying moderate operating conditions. The main aim of this doctoral thesis is to investigate the efficiency of novel in-house prepared materials to remove emerging contaminants from wastewaters such as ibuprofen, bromocresol green, alizarin red s, and methylene blue, and to compare them with classical commercial materials through adsorption and photodegradation. Both batch and semibatch operating modes were studied considering different operational parameters to investigate the kinetics. This work also includes experimental data validation through simulations for batch and semibatch systems. Advanced reactor modelling was carried out, describing the collected data in both scales with a rigorous approach, considering both physical and chemical phenomena appearing in the reaction network, i.e. discriminating between the mass transfer and reaction limiting steps.

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