Ozone In Drinking Water Treatment
Ozone is being used worldwide for water treatment. In developing countries, the lack of trained professional and the necessary expertise for handling and storage of chemicals has prompted a major move towards ozone or AOP treatment.
Ozone is a more powerful oxidizing agent than chlorine and doesn’t form THMs (tri-halomethanes) or complex chlorinated compounds that are harmful to humans.
In Europe, the majority of municipal water treatment plants employ ozone technologies while North American operations are primarily chlorine-based. However, many in North America are being converted to ozone as its benefits are being realized. Specific instances include a historic case in Milwaukee and California’s adoption of Ozone for all primary drinking water disinfection processes.
Ozone drinking water systems eliminate the following drinking water problems:
- Bacteria, including iron bacteria
- Heavy metals such as iron and manganese
- Organic contaminants such as tannin and algae
- Microbes such as Cryptosporidium, Giardia and Amoebae
- All known waterborne viruses
- Biological Oxygen Demand (BOD) and Chemical Oxygen Demand (COD)
Ozone is a highly reactive form of oxygen, capable of converting organic molecules to water and carbon dioxide. This is called mineralization. Ozone will also react with heavy metals such as iron, and manganese to form precipitates which are easily filtered.
Moreover, under certain operating conditions ozone can be converted to hydroxyl radicals which are even more powerful oxidizers than ozone itself. Processes in which ozone is converted to hydroxyl radicals to achieve higher reaction rates are known as Advanced Oxidation Processes
Ozone and Insitu AOP is used to treat a wide variety of wastewater including:
- Municipal waste water
- Meat processing
- Animal waste treatment
- Septic lechate
- Metal cutting fluids recycling
- Chicken egg processing effluent
- Laundry water recycling
See Georgia Tech Study on poultry processing plant effluent