Development of a hybrid technology for treating recalcitrant water contaminants: assessing e-beam potential.

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Manufacture is faced with the escalating challenges of resource limitation, conservation of water and the treatment of waste, whilst attempting to reduce its carbon foot-print. There is increasing realisation within industry that it is a long way from achieving the efficiency of natural systems where resources such as water, metals and organics are apparently effortlessly recycled or transformed to clean energy. This is challenging enough but it is even more daunting with the realisation that end-of-pipe industrial effluent from key manufacturing processes, such as metal working and plating, and landfill leachate are chemically mixed with high concentrations, are toxic and temporally fluctuate enormously in terms chemical composition. Until now such effluents have been considered to be significant environmental problems, costly to deal with and reliant on high capital and energy demanding technologies, such as reverse osmosis and ultra-filtration. However, with climate change and increasing pressure on natural resources industry's attitude has changed with the drive now on resource recovery and treatment on site, in order to reduce the carbon footprint associated with transportation. A growing concern is the increasing realisation that current wastewater technology procedures aimed at end-of-pipe recovery from recalcitrant effluent are all energy demanding and inefficient. This requires radical new thinking in an important but neglected area.The objective of this study is to develop new approaches and in particular test novel technological combinations (biocatalysis, zero valent nano-Fe [nZVI] and electron beam accelerators) for treating recalcitrant and chemically mixed industrial waste waters. The primary focus is to reduce the energy demand of the developed process and to harmonise the complementary technologies to sustainably degrade the organic component and precipitate, immobilise and enable metal recovery, whilst recovering the water. Chemically mixed wastewater and chlorine contaminated ground will be assessed for treatability by exploiting microbes able to biotransform such contaminants. This step will remove the readily degradable component of the effluent leaving the recalcitrant residues, that will be transferred to subsequent treatment exposures including addition of zero valent nano-Fe (nZVI). This is a highly reactive step, catalysing the chemical disintegration of recalcitrant residues, including large polymers and chemical complexes, so making them more conducive to a final biodegradation step. Biologically pre-treated recalcitrant effluent residues will also be treated by exposure to the e-beam, leading to radiolysis, production of H+ and OH radicals, resulting in vigorous reducing and oxidations conditions, and the organic becoming more bioavailable to microbiological treatment. The novel combination of nZVI with the e-beam, with a final biodegradation step, we believe will lead to the destruction of most recalcitrant residues. Parallel lab tests will be established to determine the effectiveness of all three treatments (microbiological, nZVI and e-beam) on the chemical state of the metals, immobilisation and recovery by precipitation.A broad range of waste waters will be investigated, both end-of-pipe industrial and contaminated ground-waters. A key issue will be the feasibility of converting developed technologies for transforming the organic component to useful products and recovery of the metals are feasible, scaleable and can with some development be commercialised.The primary focus of this study will be the e-beam component, in particular assessment of procedures for improving its efficiency, lowering its energy requirement since will be a key requirement in order to being commercially viable. We will also determine the most effective microbial cells at the end of the biodegradative component of the treatment.