Photo-reactors for water emerging contaminants treatment: achieved progress

The development of the cities on the Patagonian Atlantic cost, the daily life and economic activities, can provide substances potentially capable of altering aquatic life. Among them, can be mentioned drugs, licit and illicit, bactericide and pesticides. These compounds, call emerging contaminants, currently are not regulated although of their potentially harmful effect on human and aquatic environment. Studies about degradation products show that they may also be more toxic than the original compounds. In recent years, photochemical oxidation processes have been proposed as alternative for contaminated water treatment. Advanced oxidation processes (AOPs) are used in tertiary water treatment, for removing hardly biodegradable compounds and minimize microbiologic contamination. In this project, for applying these processes, it was designed and built a photo-reactor Bach type with LEDs illumination. The obtained results using some methodologies for the determination of kinetic parameters in sensitized photodegradation at this scale were compared with those obtained at laboratory scale. As study compound, it was chosen 3 hydroxipyridine (3-OHP), a wellknown substrate for our research group. Likewise, work was done on the fine-tuning of techniques that allow treated effluent toxicity analysis. The results are promising, some significant differences could be detected working at a larger scale than laboratory scale.