By way of advanced oxidation technologies (AOT's) the abatement of recalcitrant non-biodegradable industrial pollutants has bee explored for a variety of contaminants of different origin. Heterogeneous catalytic reactions using in the TiO2, Cu2O, Fe2O3 and H2O2 . The homogeneous catalytic systems consisting of Fe3+ or Cu2+-ions in the presence of H2O2 as ecological oxidants (Fenton-like systems)showed to be efficient in laboratory scale degradation processes up to 500 L/day.
The cost of electricity in. the case of the Fenton processes was about 0.30 US/m3 of contaminated water with 20200 ppm C organic contaminant. The cost of the latter process compared favorably with the more traditional non destructive methods of pollutant detoxification like reverse osmosis and incineration. AOT's approach have the advantage to act in a way that they do not transfer the pollution from one phase to another. The use of actinic light irradiation tuned to the absorbance of the Fe-charge transfer band in solution was effective in decomposing the H2O2 under light as compared to a non cyclic decomposition in dark processes. The levels of Fe3+-ion needed were about 30 ppm to attain acceptable kinetic degradation rates. Reactors were designed, build and tested in the degradation of a variety of industrial pollutants occurring in Russia and Europe. The results were compared and modelization of the parameters affecting the degradation were optimized for the energy, materials and time of degradation.
The predictive value of such an approach by the construction of polynomial expression allowed us to progress in the rigorous phenomenological design of the photoreactors used. The coupling of short pretreatment times to abate the toxicity of the industrial pollutant and the subsequent coupling to biological no-cost degradation of the intermediates was perfected to attain the less use of energy during the pretreatment period. This was seen as the most economical way to degrade non-biodegradable materials. Real waste water effluent of the textile industry were tried in this way with unexpected beneficial results in line with the more traditional methods like ozonization. The immobilization of small active clusters of Fe+3-ions was accomplished on polymeric thin films. In this way the sludge formation was avoided at the end of the process. Precipitation of these ions is known to be costly in any post treatment process. The kinetics of H2O2 decomposition was comparable to Feions added for this purpose in homogenous solutions. When testing the degradation of azo-dyes or textile waste waters real effluents in a laboratory scale flow reactor the new membrane supported materials performed well during Fenton photo-assisted degradation processes.