Thesis topic:
Tertiary treatment of wastewater with the aim of water reuse by removing selected micropollutants and applying disinfection methods
Motivation
Micropollutants have been growing importance and drawing attention during the last years. Not because they have recently appeared but because their concentrations and the difficulty to remove them have been recently discovered. The vast majority of wastewater treatment plants around the world do not treat their effluents for the removal of these contaminants because the technologies are emerging and therefore their mechanisms are complicated and expensive. The concentrations of micropollutants such as pharmaceuticals, pesticides, hormones, endocrine disruptors and personal care products contained in wastewater treatment plant effluents represent a threat to the environment and to public health when the exposure to them is chronic. Limitations in lack of information and data availability hinder the development of a feasible process application in large-scale facilities.
Solution
In the current project it is aimed to select specific micropollutants according to their incidence in specific geographic zones and their characteristics to be able to assess the analytical techniques and methods to quantify their concentrations and develop laboratory models to remove them from the effluent in an efficient way. The developed models will be also applied in large-scale wastewater treatment facilities to prove their accuracy and other possible factors that may influence their performance. A cost estimation tool that would forecast the economic aspects of the processes possible application will accompany the technical processes studied in the project.
Education
- 2015 - Present: UCT Prague, FTOP, Department of Water technology and environmental engineering. PhD Student
- 2013 - 2015: Ghent University, UCT Prague, UNESCO IHE. IMETE Programme: Environmental Technology and Engineering. Final Thesis: “Autotrophic nitrogen removal from tanning industry wastewater in biofilm reactors”.
- 2004 - 2010: Universidad Marista de Merida, Bachelor degree: Industrial and systems engineering. Final Thesis: “Growth and characterization of chromium and chromium oxide thin films for solar/thermal purposes”.
Participation on teaching
- Laboratory Course in Water Analysis and Microbiology
Publications
- Diaz-Sosa V.R., Tapia-Salazar M., Wanner J. and Cradenas-Chavez D.L. 2020. Monitoring and Ecotoxicity Assessment of Emerging Contaminants in Wastewater Discharge in the City of Prague (Czech Republic). Water, 12(4), 1079.