Elisabetta Gover

APPLICATION OF PHOTODYNAMIC INACTIVATION ON WASTEWATER

Water is an essential element for life on earth but only 2.5% of water present on the earth's surface is available for human activities and the biological needs of living organisms. The progressive demographic increase, industrialization, climate change, inter-annual climatic variability and the use of water for energy production, have determined a constant decrease in the availability of freshwater. The gradual depletion of available water represents one of the more urgent environmental issues to be addressed and therefore included among the Sustainable Development Goals adopted by the United Nations. To overcome the problems related to water scarcity, it is necessary to operate with strategies that involve the identification of unconventional water sources or through the recovery of wastewater which must be deprived of their chemical and biological pollutants. The PhD project is based on the application of photodynamic inactivation (PDI) on wastewater which is an unconventional technology capable of guaranteeing the reduction of the health risk associated with microbial contamination, while protecting environmental integrity.

The main objectives of the PhD project are:

• design and develop of new photoactive materials using PS potentially recoverable from vegetable processing waste;
• design and manufacture a bench prototype for the biological recovery of wastewater using photoactive materials;
• study the sustainability of the process in the scaling-up phase.

in progress