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Report

Teaser, summary, work performed and final results

Periodic Reporting for period 1 - AQUAlity (Interdisciplinar cross-sectoral approach to effectively address the removal of contaminants of emerging concern from water)

Teaser

Summary

Access to water is recognized as a fundamental human right by the United Nations General Assembly, whereas the achievement of clean water and sanitation is one of the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals. The complex challenge of the production of safe and clean water requires different levels of action, which include the synthesis of green materials, the development of enhanced water treatment technologies, the implementation of effective legal tools against water pollution, the correct management of the present water treatment facilities.
A peculiar aspect related to water quality is represented by the so-called Contaminants of Emerging Concern (CECs), which are compounds derived from humansâ€™ activities, detected at very low level in natural water bodies. Today, there is increasing concern about the combined effects of this multitude of chemicals as they enter the environment and the food chain and a general consensus among policy-makers that emerging substances need to be addressed in a systematic and coherent manner.
The overall research goals of AQUAlity, a multidisciplinary and cross-sectoral European Training Network, are to generate and promote highly skilled scientists with the potential to face the present and future challenges concerning the protection of water resources from CECs and to achieve the environmentally sustainable removal of CECs from aqueous systems by conducting frontier research in the field of Advanced Oxidation Processes (AOPs), materials development, nanofiltration technology. All the developed systems will be tested on differently polluted waters to prove their potential. In all processes, the energetic aspects will be taken into account to limit the consumption and to use sustainable and renewable source of energy (for instance exploiting solar technologies).

Work performed

The networkâ€™s specific research objectives are:
1) To develop advanced analytical tools for the determination of CECs and to assess their environmental fate. We applied a simplified version of the NORMAN approach to select the proper pollutants worth to be investigated; the substances were ranked using a score calculated from key indicators such as exposure, hazard, persistency, bioaccumulation and mobility. A reliable analytical procedure for their quantification and their abatement is evaluated as well as their fate in the environment for detecting the transformation products and assessing the toxicity related to the abatement processes. Statistical and chemometric tools are constantly used to properly evaluate the analytical meaning of the measurements and to predict the best conditions to be applied for an efficient removal.
2) To develop sun-driven AOPs for the enhanced removal of CECs. AOPs are based on the generation of hydroxyl radicals, which can oxidize toxic and refractory pollutants yielding their mineralization to CO2 and water. The phenomenon can be activated by solar light, a source of renewable and clean energy, which makes AOPs an environmentally friendly technology for CECs abatement. The combined approach based on the use of simulated solar light at the lab scale and in solar plant is constantly followed in order to evaluate the upscaling and the following commercialization of the process. Up to now several new materials were designed, synthesized, characterized and tested to perform AOP experiments, namely magnetite-maghemite-iron based ones for (photo)Fenton abatement, TiO2, ZrO2 and ZnO doped with transition metals and lanthanides as photocatalysts, perovskite-like materials as thermocatalysts, organic photosensitizers and hybrid materials. These materials will then be coupled with membrane nanofiltration (NF), resulting in hybrid nanofiltration/advanced oxidation systems.
3) To integrate the new AOPs with nanofiltration (NF) systems in a unique innovative hybrid tool. A great effort is in progress to explore new fabrication methods for developing NF membranes able to: (i) combine high water fluxes with high retention towards CECs, (ii) be recalcitrant to fouling, and (iii) be easily cleaned. These novel membranes will be used to both concentrate CECs during their degradation and recover the photooxidizing agents, making the overall process more effective and compact than AOP only. Several active membranes were fabricated so far at laboratory scale: the most promising ones will be tested in the solar plant to verify their effectiveness in operando conditions. Although the preliminary experiments were carried out in laboratory irradiating the photo-active materials with simulated solar light, AQUAlity works with solar technologies in order to use no-cost and sustainable source of energy without any burdens for society.
Significant results achieved are constantly communicated to the public (also non-specialized) through the experimental approach to simplify the comprehension of the phenomena. The communication with the specialized audience happens via open access sources to guarantee the largest possible result exploitation by the scientific community.
ESRs are trained to develop their creativity, critical and autonomous thinking, and entrepreneurial skills, thus boosting their scientific skills and innovation capacity in the field of water treatment technologies. They are exploiting all the opportunities available in the consortium and outside. They are being trained on scientific issues and soft-skills (communication ability, administrative and management procedures, exploitation and consequent commercialization of results) via a structured training-through-research programme, consisting of original individual research projects (performed both at the beneficiary organization and through intersectoral secondments) and education on technical and transferable skills (performed both at local level and wit

Final results

The list of hazardous compounds in water bodies is continuously monitored and updated and, because of this, the results achieved by AQUAlity consortium in this topic is surely valuable for society, as it is important that risks related to the presence of these substances are known and consequently policy-makers can create a proper regulation about them. The research carried out so far involves the abatement of a selected group of CECs belonging to several groups of compounds, the evaluation of toxicity and the study of CECs\'fate during the abatement processes. The technology developed by AQUAlity project is focused on CECs abatement but it can be applied to all polluted waters.
Furthermore, the consortium aims at limiting the energy consumption and to increase the process efficiency during a depollution process; therefore, innovative materials, often obtained from low-cost sources and prepared following the principles of the green chemistry, are designed, produced and tested in solar plants. At the end of the Action, AQUAlity is expected to have projected and tested, at pilot plant level, a hybrid technology capable of supplying, with limited consumption of energy, the population with high quality drinking water. On the whole, this project will represent a high-quality way to go one step beyond in creating the next generation of integrated Urban Water System management innovators.