Publications by authors named "P K Westerhoff"
Wastewater receives per- and polyfluoroalkyl substances (PFAS) from diverse consumer and industrial sources, and discharges are known to be a concern for drinking water quality. The PFAS family includes thousands of potential chemical structures containing organofluorine moieties. Exposures to a few well-studied PFAS, mainly perfluoroalkyl acids (PFAA), have been associated with increased risk of many adverse health outcomes, prompting federal drinking water regulations for six compounds in 2024.
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- Co-occurrence of metal oxo-anions like arsenate in drinking water can be harmful to human health, motivating the study of how to better predict their behavior in adsorption systems.
- By integrating surface complexation models with pore surface diffusion models, researchers accurately predicted the adsorption behaviors of single and mixed solutes, helping to understand how different adsorbents interact with these contaminants.
- The findings emphasized that enhancing the capacity and reactivity of adsorbents is more effective for improving water purification systems than merely focusing on pore design to minimize transport limitations.
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- Accurately assessing risks from inorganic pollutants in groundwater is crucial, but existing water quality databases often lack sufficient data due to budget constraints and sample collection challenges.
- Two advanced data imputation techniques, AMELIA and MICE, were compared, with AMELIA proving more effective in managing missing values without creating excessive outliers.
- The use of imputed data revealed significantly more potential health risks in groundwater samples, helping state agencies better allocate resources for monitoring and analysis, thus enhancing decision-making and prioritization for future sampling efforts.
Phosphorus (P) removal from water and recovery into useable forms is a critical component of creating a sustainable P cycle, although mature technologies for P removal and recovery are still lacking. The goal of this paper was to advance the testing of novel materials for P removal and recovery from water by providing guidance on the development of more realistic aqueous matrices used during materials development. Literature reports of "new" materials to remove P from water are often difficult to compare in terms of performance because authors use a myriad of water chemistries containing P concentrations, pH, and competing ions.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFActivated carbon block (ACB) filters are widely used in point-of-use (POU) drinking technology to remove tastes, odors, and organic compounds from drinking water, and when modified can even remove inorganic pollutants (e.g., arsenate, lead, copper).
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