Emerging wastewater disinfection technologies

Resumen

The increase in the world's population entails an increase in the consumption of water resources, the rise in the generation of wastewater, and the overall worsening of water quality. In this sense, the disinfection of wastewater allows, on the one hand, to improve its quality for discharge into the hydraulic public domain, but also the possibility of its reuse for other human uses. However, conventional disinfection technologies such as chlorination or ozonation have certain limitations that make them less suitable for wastewater disinfection, such as the generation of disinfection by-products as a result of the reaction with organic matter. In this regard, technologies such as advanced oxidation processes, heterogeneous photocatalysis, carbonaceous catalysts, or plasma technology are presented as alternatives. Some of these technologies still require more years of development, but others are almost present and begin to be implemented on a real scale. This chapter aims to address the fundamentals of these technologies, as well as to review the state of the art and their level of development and implementation.