New Kinetic Models for Water Disinfection using Hydrogen Peroxide

MARISOL LABAS; CRISTINA ZALAZAR; RODOLFO BRANDI; ALBERTO CASSANO

Canarias, España

Congreso; 4th European Meeting on Solar Chemistry and Photocatalysis: Environmental Applications; 2006

Hydrogen peroxide has been proposed as an attractive oxidant agent due to its convenient application characteristics. It is known that its use is fairly safe and exhibits good effectiveness. Additionally, its solubility in water is very large and reveals considerably versatility for detoxification purposes. The main uses of H2O2 in disinfection employing different operating conditions and particularly concentrations, has shown efficacious activity with vegetative bacteria, fungi, viruses, mycobateria and bacterial spores. The cytotoxicity of hydrogen peroxide is attributed to its ability to generate highly reactive oxidant species such as hydroxyl radicals OH , singlet oxygen and superoxide radicals peroxide that are very effective in attacking biomolecules In this work we studied the disinfection kinetics of E. coli. With the employed approach the obtained kinetic parameters are useful for scaling-up purposes because they are independent of the reactor shape, size and operating conditions. We have previously studied, with similar objectives, water disinfection of the same system employing UVC radiation alone, and were able to achieve a working mechanistic model based on plausible assumptions that represented with good agreement the experimental results under different operating conditions.