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Polanyi Adsorption Potential Theory for Estimating PFAS Treatment with Granular Activated Carbon
Citation:
Burkhardt, J., A. Cadwallader, J. Pressman, M. Magnuson, A. Williams, G. Sinclair, AND T. Speth. Polanyi Adsorption Potential Theory for Estimating PFAS Treatment with Granular Activated Carbon. Journal of Water Process Engineering. Elsevier B.V., Amsterdam, Netherlands, 53:103691, (2023). https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jwpe.2023.103691
Impact/Purpose:
This paper presents a theoretical approach for predicting PFAS treatability with granular activated carbon. It identified that previously derived parameters for synthetic organic compounds may not hold for PFAS as a group, and new parameters were determined and used. This work suggests that many PFAS may be economically treatable using GAC. These predictions are needed because determining these values for all PFAS will likely be intractable, but predictive approaches rely on values that can be more easily determined from experiments or simulations.
Description:
Per- and polyfluoroalkyl substances (PFAS) are a group of chemicals that have gained interest because some PFAS have been shown to have deleterious health effects and prolonged environmental and biological persistence. Chemicals classified as PFAS have a wide range of chemical moieties that impart widely variable properties, leading to a range of efficacies for water treatment processes. The Polanyi Potential Adsorption Theory was used to estimate Freundlich isotherm parameters to predict the efficacy of granular activated carbon (GAC) treatment for 428 PFAS chemicals for which the vast majority had no previously published treatment data. This method accounts for the physical/chemical characteristics of the individual PFAS beyond molecular weight or chain length that have previously been employed. Although, this analysis shows uncertainty due to the simplified approach and limited data, the statistical analysis gives confidence that many of the 428 PFAS can be effectively treated by GAC and points to which PFAS may not be economically treatable. Although not directly applicable to full-scale design, the approach demonstrates a systematic method for predicting the effectiveness of GAC where isotherm or column data are not available.
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DOI: Polanyi Adsorption Potential Theory for Estimating PFAS Treatment with Granular Activated Carbon