Catalytic Overall Detoxification of Industrial Effluents
Introduction:
Wastewater treatment is one of the most indispensable and costly units for every industry, especially with multimillion turnover. Typically, there are two major processes for the contaminant treatment namely, reverse-osmosis-based process and biological dissolved organic solid degradation of the impure water. However, the membrane-based technologies need an extensive pretreatment resulting in extraordinary higher costs for the overall reverse osmosis process plants while the biological water cleaning process includes the oxidation of dissolved organic solids by aeration which suffers from serious environmental and health concerns for reusability/recyclability of the treated water. The technology we are presenting overcomes these two factors and also is capable of providing us detoxified water at a very low cost.
Problem:
Ground water, present in the lakes, rivers, water reservoirs and the wells, is the major source of pure/soft water useful for urban/industrial/agricultural needs. Deep underground water which is also quite useful for the same needs, sometimes appears to be contaminated with toxic (e.g. arsenic) or corrosive (fluorides) elements and therefore needs apposite treatment prior to its use. Industrial wastewater treatment describes the extensive processes used for treating Industrial effluents.
Pollutants with a potential hazard for the environment and humans can enter the aquatic environment through different channels. Examples of such pollutants are organic compounds, dyes, and pharmaceutically active ingredients, processed water from textile finishing, chemical, petrochemical, and pharmaceutical production industries as well as wastewaters (contaminated with deadly bacterial, fungal, or virus infections) from hospitals may contain contaminants which are not suitable for the biological water treatment. These contaminants even require a pre-treatment prior to the introduction to biological water treatment.
Moreover, the very high extent of the corrosive contaminants present in the waste stream produced by the power-generation or heavy alloy/steel industries varies extensively depending on the type of processes used in the plants. Since the generated waste stream can be hazardous and highly toxic due to the presence of cyanides, especially for car industries, it is extremely difficult and often a tedious job to make the pretreatments and therefore the biological treatments often suffer from low sensitivity and diminished life span of the microorganisms. Even the agricultural layout is nowadays quite toxic due to the excessive use of pesticides and herbicides which in fact poses a greater threat to the aquatic lives and finally to mankind as the food-cycle.
Solution:
The novel approach of research for the decontamination of waste-water finds a pioneering success which resulted a promising option for the preservation of aquatic life even in this era of mega industrialization, simply by rapid detoxification of heavily contaminated waste-water even the production unit exhaust effluents. With our presently proposed technology, we would be able to replace the key components of both the water purification strategies namely, the RO system and the biological inefficient treatment technique for the decomposition of the dissolved organic and toxic solids for purification of industrial water.
The Keplerate: The present invention relates to the use of Keplerate type Polyoxomolybdates of the general structure {Mo72M30} and {Mo132} for decontaminating aquatic environments from organic and inorganic pollutants. The highly symmetric [(pent)12(link)30] type spherical clusters, such as the {Mo72Fe30} type nano-spheres, are comprised of 12 pentagonal {(Mo)Mo5O21} groups connected by 30{Fe} sites acting as linkers. The presence of certain trivalent metal ions for e.g. Fe3+, Cr3+ or oxo-species like (VO)2+ in an acidified aqueous solution of molybdate or tungstate at pH ≈ 2, leads to the evolution of the smaller Keplerate of the type {M72M’30}n- (M = Mo/W and M’ = FeIII, CrIII or VOII, where the M’ atoms span the vertices of an icosidodecahedron. These {M72M’30}-clusters also have 20 {M3M’3O6}-pores (pore outer aperture 0.9 pm) which can be plugged by a variety of cations. Although the smaller Keplerates are mostly neutral but, they tend to behave as “polyprotic nano-acids” due to higher Lewis acidity of the M’ centers (when M’= Fe/ Cr) by deprotonation of water molecules coordinated to M’ centers. The usage of advanced oxidation as the sole treatment process will be economical as illustrated in the scheme below.
Column: DECYN-T is designed to remove all sorts of C-contaminants even including microbes.
It contains…
Mo72Fe30 – Smaller Keplerate Wonders With Industrial Applicability
Advanced oxidation methods such as the combined use of UV radiation and oxidizing agents (such as e.g. ozone or hydrogen peroxide) have been used in such cases. The usage of the advanced oxidation process as the sole treatment process will be economically quite effective by reducing the number of sequential steps needed for the waste-water treatment in which the Keplerate-based next-generation catalysts will find their immense applications.
Column: SRAS-F/Cr is designed to remove the Arsenic, Fluorides and Chromate-contaminants.
It consists of…
Column: SRHV-M is designed to remove the toxic heavy metals including Mercury, Lead, Cadmium, Silver, Thallium, Tin, Bismuth etc.
It functions by “Molecular Machine” approach…
O.D.D. (Overall Decontamination Device): Our O.D.D. system consists of three major reaction chambers entitled (I) SRHVM, (II) DECYN-T, (III) SRAS-F. The first column i.e. SRHVM is basically targeting for the decontamination of toxic heavy metals. Whereas the second column ‘DECYN-T’ is deployed for the decontamination of the total organic pollutants including cyanide. The third column ‘SRAS-F’ is used for the removal of arsenates/arsenites, chromates, and fluorides. Finally, the polluted water, after coming out through these three major reaction chambers, will be decontaminated.
About Team:
More links:
https://www.slideshare.net/sgarai/presentation-icdk-bhuwaterfinal-247417426/secret/FNHoq792DKIz6
Important Notice:
Owing to the severe outbreak of Covid-19 in India as well as in our university, we are unable to access our research laboratory. Therefore we have set our prototype in a nearby industrial place; complete automatic operation of our prototype is yet to be achieved. Our individual columns are working at their best and semi-automatic operation of our prototype is also been performed.
We are in the process of filling two patents for Arsenic/Fluoride/Chromate and Heavy Metal removal technologies from BHU-AIC through our recently registered Start-Up: “Green Keplerate Laboratory Solutions” (Pvt. Ltd. Company, Incorporation Underway within two weeks).
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