Publications by authors named "Benedikt M Aumeier"

The confluence of pervasiveness, bioaccumulation, and toxicity in freshwater contaminants presents an environmental threat second to none. Exemplifying this trifecta, per- and polyfluoroalkyl substances (PFAS) present an alarming hazard among the emerging contaminants. State-of-the-art PFAS adsorbents used in drinking water treatment, namely, activated carbons and ion-exchange resins, are handicapped by low adsorption capacity, competitive adsorption, and/or slow kinetics.

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Persistent, Mobile, and Toxic (PMT) and very persistent and very mobile (vPvM) substances are a growing threat to water security and safety. Many of these substances are distinctively different from other more traditional contaminants in terms of their charge, polarity, and aromaticity. This results in distinctively different sorption affinities towards traditional sorbents such as activated carbon.

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Permanently charged and ionizable organic compounds (IOC) are a large and diverse group of compounds belonging to many contaminant classes, including pharmaceuticals, pesticides, industrial chemicals, and natural toxins. Sorption and mobility of IOCs are distinctively different from those of neutral compounds. Due to electrostatic interactions with natural sorbents, existing concepts for describing neutral organic contaminant sorption, and by extension mobility, are inadequate for IOC.

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Imperative decarbonization of water purification processes entails alternative regeneration methods for activated carbon. Regeneration based on changing dissociation equilibria, i.e.

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Decentralized drinking water purification complements water supply in areas with unreliable or absent infrastructure. The exacerbating consequences of climate change in form of droughts and floods force remote households to tap various water sources. Hence, household-based processes must be versatile to cope with e.

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Recently, activated carbon adsorption for water treatment regained substantial attention due to the emerging task to remove trace organic compounds such as pesticides. In many applications, especially in decentralized water treatment, one major drawback of adsorbents is their limited recyclability due to inadequate logistics or uneconomical reactivation. In this lab-scale study, we present the temperature swing adsorption in the aqueous phase that allows the in situ regeneration of fixed-bed adsorbers, and prove its technical feasibility.

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Decentralized drinking water treatment is limited by supply of service, consumables, spare parts and in particular, power. Therefore, gravity-driven dead-end ultrafiltration is applied to purify surface water with high suspended solid loading. To obtain high flux in the long term, an effective membrane backwash is mandatory.

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