Removal is removal; or is it? Towards decoupling physisorption from true degradation on carbon-supported fenton-like composite catalysts Bence Solymosi, Dr. Robert Menzel, Dr. Charlotte Willans, Dr. Thomas Chamberlain University of Leeds, UK Globally 1 in 3 people don’t have access to safe drinking water 1 . The presence of micropollutants is an important contributor to this, as current industrial treatment methods cannot effectively remove them due to their chemical stability and very low concentration. These persistent pollutants include pharmaceuticals, steroid hormones, surfactants, industrial chemicals and pesticides, and can have significant adverse health effects, even causing endocrine disruptions 2 . Many large scale water purification methods are based on adsorption, which does remove pollutants from effluents but saturated adsorbents are still problematic and often end up simply being incinerated. Even current degradation-based water treatment methods come with significant drawbacks: most importantly high installation and operating costs, and potential production of secondary pollution. The use of high surface area supports can significantly enhance organics removal and reduce environmental impact by making catalytic systems more efficient, reducing catalyst leaching and reducing the overall amount of catalyst necessary. Carbon supports have become very popular is research due to their low cost, high abundance and favourable emergent synergistic effects in catalysis. An often overlooked aspect of this in the context of water treatment research is that the overall reduction in aqueous organics facilitated by catalytic processes is made up of a combination of adsorption and degradation, where the contribution of each is generally unknown. This can lead to a overestimation of catalytic activity, which in any real world application would significantly drop off after the carbon supports surface becomes saturated with pollutants. This work uses bulk characterisation methods along with adsorption and degradation experiments to elucidate the structure-performance relationship of Fenton-like catalysts supported on normal and treated carbon materials. The author aims to decouple adsorption on carbon surfaces from catalytic degradation facilitated by industrially relevant carbon supported transition metal oxides and thus gain a deeper understanding of how relatively adsorptionless, high activity composite catalysts can be produced for more environmentally benign tertiary water treatment methods. References 1. Progress on drinking water, sanitation and hygiene: 2000-2017: Special focus on inequalities, UN Joint Monitoring Programme report, 2017
2. W. Guo, H. H. Ngo et al., Sci. Total Environ., 473–474, 2014 , 619-641 3. M. A. Oturan and J-J. Aaron, Crit. Rev. Environ. , 44, 2014 , 2577–2641
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