I am venturing on microplastics or other contaminants that can be eliminated in water, wastewater or even sediments using electron beam technology.
To my knowledge, this technique has never been used for the removal of microplastics, in particular, and the articles on the subject do not talk about it. It is not known whether this technique is effective in removing microplastics and how much it costs.
Electron beam treatment of industrial wastewater has been used in the past (In the 2000s) for the removal of non-degradable wastes, and also for the re-use of wastewater in the production process. For industrial wastewater with low impurity levels such as contaminated groundwater, cleaning water and etc., purification only with an electron beam is possible, but requires a high amount of irradiation doses. For industrial wastewater with high impurity levels such as dyeing wastewater, leachate and etc., purification only with an electron beam requires a high amount of doses and far beyond economies.
Electron beam treatment combined with conventional purification methods such as coagulation, biological treatment etc. is suitable for the reduction of non-biodegradable impurities in wastewater and will extend the application area of the electron beam.
In addition to conventional treatments that remove microplastics, there are emerging technologies of microplastics removal in water treatment.
There is a constant search for new technologies to remove microplastics from water and water treatment wastes. Electrocoagulation has come into the limelight as it uses electrochemical reactions to induce coagulation instead of merely chemicals or microbes, hence more cost-effective. Hydroxides of Fe3+ or Al3+ are produced during the electrochemical reaction which upon colliding with the pollutant particles, form micro-flocs. In an experiment by Perren et al. (2018) to investigate the effectiveness of electrocoagulation in removing microplastics, the removal efficiency of more than 90% has been reported and up to 99.2% was achieved when the pH was 7.5.
Magnetic extraction offers another potential method of water treatment to remove microplastics. It uses Fe nanoparticles coated with hexadecyltrimethoxysilane as magnetic seeds for the magnetic extraction of microplastics from water. This method was able to recover 84 and 78% of medium-sized microplastics (200–1000 µm) from freshwater and sediment respectively while extracting 92% of small (
I think you can try with the vacuum chamber
https://learnmech.com/electron-beam-machining-ebm-advantages-disadvantages/
Dear Angelo Panlaqui ,
Your hypothesis of using electron beam irradiation would be effective on changing the microplastic properties. Because there are plenty of researches in past similarly.
- Badges
- Science topic
- Similar topics
- Filing