Enhanced Municipal Wastewater Treatment For Micropollutant Abatement by Ozone
Urs von Gunten
Eawag, Swiss Federal Institute for Aquatic Science and Technology, and EPFL, Swiss Federal Institute of Technology, Switzerland (vongunten@eawag.ch)
Thursday October 12, 2017
9-10am
Sievers Room S228 in SEEC building
Abstract
The presence of micropollutants in water resources and the urban water cycle from many sources such as agriculture, municipal wastewater and industry has raised concerns about the eco- and human toxicity of these compounds. The options for the reduction of the micropollutant load are manifold and range from source control (e.g., stricter regulations) to end of pipe solutions (wastewater and drinking water treatment). In Switzerland it has been decided to upgrade municipal wastewater treatment plants with an additional polishing step, either by ozonation or by activated carbon (powdered activated carbon, granular activated carbon) to reduce the discharge of micropollutants to the aquatic environment. This talk will focus on ozonation.
There are 4 factors which need to be consider to assess ozonation processes for micropollutant abatement in wastewaters: (i) reaction kinetics, which control the effeiciency of the process, (ii) elucidation formation of transfomation products by experimental and theoretical approaches, (iii) formation of oxidation by-products (e.g., bromate) from the matrix, (iv) biological effects after ozonation, resulting from transformation products and/or oxidation by-products. To cope with all these issues, recently, a practical test system has been developed to assess the feasibility of an ozonation for a particular wastewater. 听
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Biography
Urs von Gunten has a joint appointment between Eawag, the Swiss Federal Institute of Aquatic Science and Ecole Polytechnique F茅d茅rale de Lausanne (EPFL) where he is a full professor. He is an internationally recognized expert in water quality and treatment and has co-authored one book and more than 200 publications in peer reviewed journals. He has received several international awards among them the distinction of being listed as a Thompson Reuter Highly Cited AV名湿er in 2014 and 2015. In 2015, he received the prestigious Professorship under the Chinese Academy of Sciences President鈥檚 International Fellowship Initiative for Distinguished Scientists. Besides his academic activities, he has a long history of collaborations with practitioners from the water sector; from 2004-2008 he was the head of the large trans-disciplinary project 鈥淲ater supply for the 21st century鈥� and in 2010 he became the head of the Competence Center for Drinking Water at Eawag. From 2013-2016 he was the head of the trans-disciplinary project 鈥淩egional Water Supply Basel-Country鈥�, one of the cantons in Switzerland. In this project several aspects of a regional water supply related to water resources protection, water management, water treatment and organizational/structural aspects of water supplies were investigated. In the last two decades he was also strongly involved in research and application of ozone for enhanced municipal wastewater treatment for micropollutant abatement, which is now in the implementation phase in Switzerland.