Solar Heterogeneous Photocatalytic Oxidation for Water and Wastewater Treatment: Problems and Challenges

Solar operation of heterogeneous photocatalytic oxidation reactors is looked at as a sustainable process for water and wastewater treatment, because it does not consume electric power and chemicals. However, there are still problems for technical-scale application. The problems addressed in this article are large area demand, water evaporation from open reactors and lack of simple photocatalyst recovery. An optimum solar reactor type is the parabolic compound collector reactor with borosilicate glass tubes. Challenges for further research are improvement in mass transfer as well as identification of novel photocatalysts which make use also of visible light, are efficient and stable, and are easy to be produced in an economically feasible way. Also the combination of photocatalysts with adsorbents is promising. Although membrane filtration processes have been successfully combined with solar photocatalytic oxidation and represent a safe barrier against spreading photocatalyst nanoparticles into the aquatic environment, more simple and less energy-consuming methods for photocatalyst recovery would be desirable.