Removal of several pesticides in a falling water film DBD reactor with activated carbon textile: Energy efficiency

Bio-recalcitrant micropollutants are often insufficiently removed by modern wastewater treatment plants to meet the future demands worldwide. Therefore, several advanced oxidation techniques, including cold plasma technology, are being investigated as effective complementary water treatment methods. In order to permit industrial implementation, energy demand of these techniques needs to be minimized. To this end, we have developed an electrical discharge reactor where water treatment by dielectric barrier discharge (DBD) is combined with adsorption on activated carbon textile and additional ozonation. The reactor consists of a DBD plasma chamber, including the adsorptive textile, and an ozonation chamber, where the DBD generated plasma gas is bubbled. In the present paper, this reactor is further characterized and optimized in terms of its energy efficiency for removal of the five pesticides α-HCH, pentachlorobenzene, alachlor, diuron and isoproturon, with initial concentrations ranging between 22 and 430 μg/L. Energy efficiency of the reactor is found to increase significantly when initial micropollutant concentration is decreased, when duty cycle is decreased and when oxygen is used as feed gas as compared to air and argon. Overall reactor performance is improved as well by making it work in single-pass operation, where water is flowing through the system only once. The results are explained with insights found in literature and practical implications are discussed. For the used operational conditions and settings, α-HCH is the most persistent pesticide in the reactor, with a minimal achieved electrical energy per order of 8 kWh/m³, while a most efficient removal of 3 kWh/m³ or lower was reached for the four other pesticides.

Removal of atrazine in water by combination of activated carbon and dielectric barrier discharge

Efficiency of modern wastewater treatment plants to remove or decompose persistent contaminants in low concentration is often insufficient to meet the demands imposed by governmental laws. Novel, efficient and cheap methods are required to address this global issue. We developed a new type of plasma reactor, in which atrazine decomposition by atmospheric dielectric barrier discharge (DBD) in dry air is combined with micropollutant adsorption on activated carbon textile and with extra bubbling of generated ozone. Investigation of reaction kinetics and by-product analysis shows that increasing input power with a factor 3.5 leads to deeper atrazine oxidation without significantly changing energy yield of atrazine removal. By-products of first and later generations are detected with HPLC-MS analysis in water and adsorbed on the activated carbon textile. Our reactor is compared in energy efficiency with reactors described in literature, showing that combination of plasma discharge with pollutant adsorption and ozone recycling is attractive for future applications of water treatment.