The Clean Water Technology Lab – is a Helmholtz Innovation Lab located at the Department of Experimental Thermal Fluid Dynamics. It is an interface between research and industry where new ideas for sustainable water treatment are continuously tested and developed into breakthrough technological applications.
It offers various opportunities for collaboration, such as research and development on the subject of advanced oxidation processes.
New regulations regarding the removal of emerging pollutants push conventional wastewater treatment technologies to their limit. Plant operators are now looking for new technologies that offer an effective and economically viable alternative for water treatment systems to comply with new standards for emerging pollutant treatment.
Experts at the Innovation Lab have developed a novel approach to emerging pollutant degradation that involves the combination of ozonation and hydrodynamic cavitation. A sidestream of contaminated wastewater is enriched with ozone and then injected under pressure through a nozzle specially designed to induce hydrodynamic cavitation. Through this process, extreme temperatures are generated together with highly reactive hydroxyl radicals (OH*). The combined effect of oxidation through OH* and thermal degradation has been shown to be able to degrade pollutant molecules not affected by existing treatment alternatives for emerging pollutants, e.g. ozone gas injection.
The developed process offers the following advantages:
- Degradation of pollutants resistant to other oxidation processes
- No need for further materials apart from oxygen, e.g. catalysts
- In-pipe solution which does not require large reactor volumes and allows for better control of oxidation agent dosage
The technology is now at TRL 3-4, where the degradation of resistant chemical species (succinic acid, PFAS) in spiked clean water and wastewater treatment plant effluents has been measured at a laboratory plant with a capacity of 100 L/h. Partnerships are now required for supporting the demonstration of the process by tests with different wastewater samples and under practical conditions in pilot scale as a bypass of an existing wastewater treatment plant. Research cooperation agreements,financial agreements and/or commercial agreements with technical assistance are envisaged.
Advantages and innovation
The proposed technology has been shown to be capable of removing resistant pollutants for which there are no established technologies in the market, but which are regarded as substances of concern and included in existing and proposed regulations for drinking water and wastewater quality. The ozone enrichment and injection of a side stream results in smaller reactor volumes required, while also enabling a more precise dosage of ozone in comparison with ozone gas injection. Alternative advanced oxidation processes find themselves also in development and require either additional materials (catalysts) or large amounts of energy (UV degradation), which point towards possible advantages of the proposed technology.
Technical Specification or Expertise Sought
Partners with expertise in the mentioned fields, e.g., such as:
- emerging pollutant removal
- sludge pre-treatment (for anaerobic digestion or phosphorus recovery)
- activated carbon, sand filters