Current work

WATERSPOUTT
Water - Sustainable Point-Of-Use Treatment Technologies

Project Summary:
My work deals with the Fenton-driven enhancement of solar disinfection for drinking water in Africa, through the H2020 WATERSPOUTT Project: http://www.waterspoutt.eu

My post-doctoral work for the WaterSPOUTT EU H2020 Project began on 1/1/2017 for the next 3 years (2017-2020), and the overall aim is to transform people’s access to safe drinking water in Africa through integrated social sciences, education and solar technologies. Along with 17 other partners, we will develop a range of large volume (≥20L) sustainable solar disinfection (SODIS) technologies that will provide affordable access to safe drinking water to remote and vulnerable communities throughout Sub-Saharan Africa and other resource-poor countries. My specific tasks, in more detail, will involve synthesis of an intrinsic kinetic model of microbial inactivation under simulated solar light, based on the present understanding of the state-of-art in the field will be formulated. The model will then integrate the impact of the various chemical components of natural drinking water, including dissolved iron, the iron oxides acting as semiconductors, as well as parts of heterogeneous inactivation process and an the influence of the natural organic matter. Emphasis will be given in the enhancement of SODIS by the photo-Fenton process and TiO2 photocatalysis, and how to easily achieve high efficacy of these processes in situ. The impact of the enhanced SODIS, will be evaluated through alternative evaluation (genomic) techniques. The evaluation of the toxicological risks of the treated water, by leachable or extractable compounds, will be tested, and finally application of the models developed to the WATERSPOUTT innovations proposed by the consortium will be performed.

Past Work

Treatment of Hospital Wastewaters in Ivory Coast and Colombia by Advanced Oxidation Processes

Supervisor: Prof. Dr. César Pulgarin
Co-Supervisor: Dr. Luiz Felippe De Alencastro

Project Summary:
The global objective of the project is to develop relevant, efficient and sustainable techniques based on advanced oxidation processes (AOPs) for the treatment of emergent organic and microbiological pollutants in the hospital wastewaters in Ivory Coast, the Pacific region of Colombia and Switzerland.

Thesis Abstract:
Hospital wastewaters have been long identified as carriers of chemical and microbiological pollutants. Their amounts and risk levels have initiated numerous works on changing the existing practices of co-treatment with municipal wastewaters and safe disposal in the environment. In this work, the issue of hospital wastewater treatment is studied in two different contexts, in Switzerland and in developing countries (Ivory Coast and Colombia). For this purpose, their treatment with municipal wastewater effluents is recreated, simulating the developed countries’ context, while cheap and sustainable solutions are proposed for the developing countries, to form a barrier between hospitals and receiving water bodies. In both examples, the use of Advanced Oxidation Processes is implemented, focusing on UV-based and solar-supported ones, in the respective target areas. A list of emerging contaminants and bacteria are firstly studied to provide operational and engineering details on their removal by AOPs. Fundamental mechanistic insights are provided as well on the degradation of the effluent wastewater organic matter. The use of viruses and yeasts as potential model pathogens is also accounted for, treated by the photo-Fenton process. Emphasis is given on the influence of the wastewater matrix parameters (organic matter, pH, iron speciation etc.) and the exploration of the internal oxidative events, by the use of genomic and proteomic analyses, respectively. Finally, two pharmaceutically active compound (PhAC) models of hospital and/or industrial origin are studied in wastewater and urine, treated by all accounted AOPs, as a proposed method to effectively control concentrated point-source pollution from industrial and hospital wastewaters, respectively. Their elimination was modeled and the degradation pathway was elucidated by the use of state-of-the-art analytical techniques (TOF-MS, Orbitrap). The use of light-supported AOPs was proven to be effective in degrading the respective target and further insights were provided by each application, which could facilitate their divulgation and potential application in the field.