A test was developed to measure the present-day adsorptive capacity of granular activated to help drinking water treatment professionals to determine when the GAC needs replacement.
The
pore and surface diffusion model of adsorption was used to
develop an equation that indicates that the fraction of a trace contaminant
removed across a granular activated carbon (GAC) column during water
treatment is an exponentially decaying function of the empty bed contact
time (EBCT), and a parameter φ that accounts for GAC preloading.
An experimental method using partially saturated GAC harvested from
a plant was proposed to allow the value for φ to be determined
for GAC from that site. With this information, the ability of the
GAC to remove a contaminant of interest could be predicted for different
EBCTs, or for different GAC service times, potentially allowing utilities
to predict how much service time is left before the GAC needs to be
replaced to meet some treatment target. Two conditions of the current
method are that organic loading must be relatively consistent throughout
the GAC lifetime and the water temperature during model calibration
should be the same as that at full scale; however, the model allows
for a future modification to account for these variables. The prediction
capability of the model was validated by comparing the breakthrough
from independent pilot-scale tests with the predicted breakthrough
calculated using the calibrated model and bench-scale tests.
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