Water Resources Research Act Program

Details for Project ID 2013NJ338B

Developing an environmentally friendly water reuse technology using ferrate (VI)

Institute: New Jersey
Year Established: 2013 Start Date: 2013-03-01 End Date: 2014-02-28
Total Federal Funds: $5,000 Total Non-Federal Funds: $10,001

Principal Investigators: Nanzhu Li, Yang Deng

Project Summary: Ferrate(VI) is an emerging environmentally friendly chemical oxidant due to its high redox capacity and non-toxic final product. It can simultaneously function as an oxidant, coagulant, sorbent and disinfectant. These unique treatment characteristics allow ferrate (VI) to be a new and potential treatment chemical to achieve water reclamation in a single step. The primary purpose of this proposed project is to evaluate the technical and economic feasibility of ferrate (VI) as an emerging green agent for simultaneous removal of pollutants from secondary effluent to achieve water reclamation. The central hypothesis is that different contaminants in secondary effluents can be significantly removed by ferrate (VI) through oxidation, coagulation, adsorption and disinfection. We propose three tasks to test our hypothesis: 1) to evaluate the removal of traditional contaminants from secondary effluent using ferrate; 2) to kinetically and mechanistically test the removal of estriol (E3), a representative emerging contaminant, in secondary effluent using ferrate; and 3) to compare treatment and cost of ferrate oxidation and current water reuse technologies for water reuse. The preliminary data will provide necessary information on the feasibility of ferrate for water reuse, and, if successful, will encourage the PI to develop a more comprehensive study to further develop the new water reuse technology in her dissertation research.