Journals Proceedings

Abstract

Clean water for drinking and cooking has been a serious issue in rural areas of Vietnam, which is mainly due to high-cost treatment of the available water sources in such areas. In order to decrease the treatment cost, gel-derived Ag-TiO2-SiO2 thin film coated on glass beads were used as disinfection materials under UV-C light in this work. The photocatalyst was used in a continuous-flow lab-scale reactor to disinfect E.coli in water. It was found that the bactericidal activity of this system using the gel-derived Ag-TiO2-SiO2 photoatalyst under UV-C irradiation was superior to those using UV-C irradiation alone, a combination of bare glass beads and UV-C irradiation. By using gel-derived Ag-TiO2-SiO2thin film, the above reactor was observed to remove 6-log of E.coli under UV-C within the hydraulic retention time of 6 minutes.The reactor was also operated with Mekong river water (includes Tien river and Hau river) with the inlet microbial loading of Tien river (after filtering) from 50 – 780 CFU Coliform/100mL and that of Hau river (after filtering) from 100 – 260 CFU Coliform /100 mL. The optimum flow rate of Mekong river water for Coliform disinfection was determined to be 15 mL/min (hydraulic retention time of 9 minutes) which revealed potential application of this photocatalyst in an energy-saving technology for drinking water