Grants and Contributions:

Grant or Award spanning more than one fiscal year (2017-2018 to 2018-2019).

The presence of pharmaceuticals and endocrine disrupting compounds (EDCs) in natural waters has raisedx000D
increasing concern due to their frequent appearance and persistence in aquatic ecosystem and the threat tox000D
health and safety of aquatic life, even at trace concentrations. Conventional water treatment processes arex000D
known to be generally inadequate for the elimination of these persistent contaminants. Studies havex000D
demonstrated that about 64% of EDCs are removed by less than 50% while 9% are not removed at all byx000D
conventional biological treatment processes. Therefore, the development of efficient and sustainable removalx000D
methods for these emerging contaminants is essential. TiO2 is the most widely used photocatalyst for removalx000D
of organic contaminants from water. However, the higher efficiencies of ZnO compared to TiO2 forx000D
elimination of organic contaminant has been reported in several studies. Photocatalytic removal of EDCs byx000D
using zinc oxide photocatalyst (ZnO) is a promising process due to the unique characteristics of thisx000D
photocatalyst such as wide band gap, non-toxicity and low cost. Recently, a considerable effort has been madex000D
to improve the photocatalytic performance of ZnO by doping with elements and narrowing band gap in order tox000D
be activated under visible light irradiation. However, any effort to narrow the band gap of semiconductors leadsx000D
to the reduction of redox potential, as well as the efficiencies of elimination and mineralization. As anx000D
alternative strategy, surface modification is considered for enhancing the efficiency of adsorption andx000D
photocatalytic oxidation in this research. It is expected that surface fluorination of ZnO also enhances thex000D
photocatalytic degradation of emerging contaminants. Through building a partnership with the Daguax000D
Technology Inc., this research is attempting to synthesize a dual functional hierarchical adsorbent/photocatalystx000D
with high surface area and stability for removing EDCs from water with low energy consumption. For thisx000D
purpose, a tubular photoreactor will be designed in this study to perform experiments for elimination andx000D
mineralization of sulfamethoxazole as widely detected antibiotic in water, under extremely