Cold plasma technology: advanced and sustainable approach for wastewater treatment

Abstract

Cold plasma has been a potent energy-efficient and eco-friendly advanced oxidation technology which has gained attention in recent decades as a non-thermal approach in diverse forms of applications. This review highlights a comprehensive account of the implementation of this technology in the field of wastewater treatment to resolve certain issues regarding the degradation of numerous aqueous pollutants and water-borne pathogenic microorganisms including viruses up to a significant level. The paper addresses plasma chemistry sources and mechanisms on wastewater treatment and impact on various physical, chemical, and biological characteristics of treated water. Furthermore, studies have revealed that this emerging technology is effective in inactivating SARS-CoV-2 or coronavirus, which serves as a transmission channel for this lethal virus in wastewater. Despite these benefits, the development of cold plasma as a wastewater treatment technique is still hampered by a lack of information like capital investment, proficient application, liveability, and operating cost, thus necessitating additional research for its booming commercialization, as this can be an emerging approach to solving water crises and meeting the demand for fresh or potable water resources.

A Cold Plasma Technology for Ensuring the Microbiological Safety and Quality of Foods

“…In juices, cold plasma technology leads to the degradation of extremely polymerized oligosaccharides [146], which is caused by ozonolysis. The high consumption of gas is also cited as a limitation or drawback of the technology [147], especially for large-scale applications. Furthermore, the high cost of setting up the cold plasma technology tends to be a major challenge or drawback.…”

“…Studies have demonstrated the potential and application of cold plasma technology in the decontamination of wastewater. Cold plasma decontamination lowers the amount of pollutants in wastewater [147]. Furthermore, treatment with cold plasma reduced several water-borne pathogenic microorganisms [46, [148][149][150][151] revealed the substantial inactivation of spike protein in plasma inactivated water to inhibit coronavirus transmission.…”

Disinfection of corona and myriad viruses in water by non-thermal plasma: a review

“…As a result, understanding the parameters that influence NTP’s antiviral efficacy is critical. Numerous studies have found that several parameters substantially impact the effectiveness of NTP (Bermudez-Aguirre 2019 ; Gururani et al 2021 ). These parameters are essential in the inactivation of viruses.…”

“…It is widely utilized because it may inactivate harmful microorganisms at room temperature without wasting energy in heating the background gas (Assadi et al 2021 ). It has been proven to remediate contaminated surfaces safely and efficiently at atmospheric pressure and room temperature (Gururani et al 2021 ). A variety of techniques can be used to create cold plasma, such as DBD and corona discharges (CD) (Van Nguyen et al 2019 ; Domonkos et al 2021 ).…”

“…NTP has been reported as an approach for viral inactivation in water only in a few articles; however, it has shown great potential and has been proven to inactivate various viruses in water. For instance, NTP has successfully inactivated all SARS-CoV-2 (Chen and Wirz 2020 ; Ghernaout and Elboughdiri 2020 ; Capelli et al 2021 ; Gururani et al 2021 ), Rotavirus CP ((El-Kalliny et al 2021 ), bacteriophages T4, 174, and MS2 (Guo et al 2018a ), Potato Virus Y (Filipić et al 2019 ), and Tulane virus (Min et al 2016 ).…”