The 8th International Conference on Water Resource and Environment (WRE 2022)

Abstract: Photocatalysis and cold plasma are emerging technologies for water treatment. However, mechanistic investigation is still needed to understand the extent and the nature of synergistic effects possibly arising when they are acting simultaneously, both in terms of bacterial deactivation and degradation of organic pollutants. Our recent results reveal that when these processes occur in plasma activated water in the presence of irradiated TiO2 as the photocatalyst, the efficiency of the integrated process is lower than the sum of the two processes acting separately, even if higher that the efficiency of the single technologies. On the other hand, synergistic effects are arising by simple UV-A irradiation of the plasma activated water, due to the presence of in situ generated photo-active species. This finding is of interest as a chlorine-free approach for water purification of industrial effluents in food industry.