Performance of Recirculated PAC for Organic Micropollutant Removal – Development of a Quick Lab Test

Abstract

Over the last decade, a wide range of organic micropollutants (OMP) has been regularly detected in surface water, groundwater and wastewater treatment plant (WWTP) effluent. These OMPs consist mainly of synthetic organic compounds (SOC) such as pharmaceuticals and pesticides. Although their concentrations in water bodies are usually low, they can cause potential risks to disturbance and affect human as well as environmental health, which has attracted the attention of governments and institutions to search for reliable and simple methods with low cost to remove them. Powdered activated carbon (PAC) adsorption is considered to be an efficient, convenient and cheap method to remove OMPs with low concentrations. However, the adsorption capacity of PAC is not fully used due to a short contact time in the traditional adsorption treatment of dosing PAC into water directly. Therefore, some processes such as the Actiflo Carb or PAC membrane reactors, recirculate PAC in order to increase the contact time. Predicting the performance of older, recirculated PAC is difficult. The objective of this project was to simulate performance of aged PAC using a simple lab-scale experiment. Three different water matrices (tap water, WWTP effluent and diluted WWTP effluent) were used to make the OMPs solutions with 18 selected OMPs of 10 ug/L. PAC was added into the OMPs solutions to make two concentrations of PAC suspension (0.5 g/L and 0.25 g/L). Samples were collected at fixed time intervals. The breakthrough behavior of selected OMPs for aged PAC was then investigated and determined by analyzing the OMPs concentration, UV254 and DOC of samples. The setup was successfully used to record breakthrough curves of 5 different OMPs (Gabapentin, Sulfadimethoxine, Sulfamethoxazole, Metformin and Clofibric acid) and UV254 in 3 different water matrices. Gabapentin was the least adsorbable in tap water and the breakthrough occurred after 10 hours, while in WWTP effluent, Sulfadimethoxine was the least adsorbable OMP with the complete breakthrough time of 14 hours. Propranolol was the most adsorbable compound in both tap water and WWTP effluent. The breakthrough of UV254 was observed later in tap water and WWTP effluent, about 24 hours and 22 hours, respectively. However, parameter DOC can not be used to predicate the breakthrough of OMPs accurately. Model fitting based on the experimental adsorption data was also included.