Publications related to Persulfate-Based Advanced Oxidation: Critical Assessment of Opportunities and Roadblocks

The Mn(VII)-H2O2 oxidation process: Abatement of electron-deficient N-containing organic compounds

Chemical oxidants applied in water treatment are electrophiles, which preferentially attack sites with higher electron density. This typically results in less efficient oxidative abatement of organic compounds with electronwithdrawing substituents. In this ...

Elsevier Science Sa2024

Oxidation processes and me

Urs von Gunten

This publication summarizes my journey in the field of chemical oxidation processes for water treatment over the last 30+ years. Initially, the efficiency of the application of chemical oxidants for micropollutant abatement was assessed by the abatement of ...

Pergamon-Elsevier Science Ltd2024

Charge-Transfer States in Organic Nanowires

Lucile Annie Chassat

Charge separation processes in organic semiconductors play a pivotal role in diverse applications ranging from photovoltaics to photocatalysis. Understanding these mechanisms, particularly the role of hybrid charge-transfer (CT) states, is essential for ad ...

EPFL2024

Reactivity of Cyanobacteria Metabolites with Ozone: Multicompound Competition Kinetics

Urs von Gunten

Cyanobacterial blooms occur at increasing frequency and intensity, notably in freshwater. This leads to the introduction of complex mixtures of their products, i.e., cyano-metabolites, to drinking water treatment plants. To assess the fate of cyano-metabol ...

Amer Chemical Soc2024

HaloTag-Based Tools for Live-Cell Imaging and Elucidation of Organellar Redox Biology

Sarah Emmert

Redox homeostasis is a key factor in maintaining cellular function and health. The main determinant of the intracellular redox potential is ubiquitous glutathione (GSH) together with its oxidized dimer (GSSG). Importantly, both redox equilibrium and GSH ho ...

EPFL2024

Influence of aerosol acidity and organic ligands on transition metal solubility and oxidative potential of fine particulate matter in urban environments

Gerhard Lammel, Athanasios Nenes

The adverse health effects of air pollution around the world have been associated with the inhalation of fine particulate matter (PM2.5). Such outcomes are thought to be related to the induction of oxidative stress due to the excess formation of reactive o ...

Elsevier2023

Oxidative Water Treatment: The Track Ahead

Urs von Gunten, Yun Ho Lee

Chemical oxidation has been applied in municipal water treatment for more than a century, initially for disinfection. In the early decades, chlorine disinfection was adopted in the fight against waterborne disease. However, the oxidative properties of chlo ...

2023

Bacterial inactivation in sunlit surface waters is dominated by reactive species that emanate from the synergy between light, iron, and natural organic matter

César Pulgarin, Stefanos Giannakis, Jun Ma, Da Wang, Shuang Song

In this study, the synergistic and antagonistic effects of Fe species and coexisting natural organic matter (NOM) on the efficacy of solar light disinfection of water are investigated. Different initial iron species (Fe2+/Fe3+) and naturalorganic matter ty ...

Elsevier2023

Critical Review on Bromate Formation during Ozonation and Control Options for Its Minimization

Urs von Gunten

Ozone is a commonly applied disinfectant and oxidantin drinkingwater and has more recently been implemented for enhanced municipalwastewater treatment for potable reuse and ecosystem protection. Onedrawback is the potential formation of bromate, a possible ...

AMER CHEMICAL SOC2023

Evaluation of the role of superoxide radical as chain carrier for the formation of hydroxyl radical during ozonation

Gang Yu, Urs von Gunten, Yan Wang

Superoxide radicals (O-2(center dot-)) have been suggested as an important chain carrier in the radical chain reaction that promotes ozone (O-3) decomposition to hydroxyl radicals ((OH)-O-center dot) during ozonation. However, due to the difficulty in meas ...

PERGAMON-ELSEVIER SCIENCE LTD2023

Mechanistic insights on interactions of dissolved organic matter with chemical oxidants: quantification of reactive sites and identification of oxidation byproducts

Joanna Maria Houska

Chemical oxidants including ozone (O3), chlorine (HOCl/OCl-) and chlorine dioxide (ClO2) are applied for disinfection of drinking water. To cope with water scarcity and the increased risks associated with the presence of micropollutants, water treatment sy ...

EPFL2023

Predicting Transformation Products during Aqueous Oxidation Processes: Current State and Outlook

Urs von Gunten

Water quality and its impacts on human and ecosystem health presents tremendous global challenges. While oxidative water treatment can solve many of these problems related to hygiene and micropollutants, identifying and predicting transformation products f ...

2023

Using Complex Hydrides for Hydrogen Storage and Direct Borohydride Fuel Cells for Electricity Production

Youngdon Ko

Hydrogen storage and utilization are the technologies to achieve carbon-neutral energy systems with renewable energy sources. Among the various materials that have been investigated, complex hydrides are a material exhibiting high gravimetric hydrogen dens ...

EPFL2023

Bioaccumulation and molecular effects of carbamazepine and methylmercury co-exposure in males of Dreissena polymorpha

Dominique Grandjean, Florian Frédéric Vincent Breider, Claudia Cosio, Nguyên Thiên Kim Lê

Dreissena polymorpha is a bivalve promising for biomonitoring in freshwater ecosystems thanks to its abundance and high filtration activity allowing rapid uptake of toxicants and identification of their negative effects. Nonetheless, we still lack knowledg ...

2023

Why five decades of massive research on heterogeneous photocatalysis, especially on TiO2, has not yet driven to water disinfection and detoxification applications? Critical review of drawbacks and challenges

César Pulgarin, Julian Andrés Rengifo Herrera

For fifty years, heterogeneous photocatalysis has been considered as having potential to remove organic and microbiological pollutants from water under either artificial UV light or sunlight irradiation. However, after tens of thousands of published resear ...

Elsevier Science Sa2023

Detecting the metabolism of individual yeast mutant strain cells when aged, stressed or treated with antioxidants with diamond magnetometry

Mayeul Sylvain Chipaux

Free radicals play a key role in the ageing process. However, free radicals are small, reactive and short lived and thus challenging to measure. We utilize a new technique called diamond magnetometry for this pur-pose. We make use of nitrogen vacancy cente ...

ELSEVIER SCI LTD2023

Hypervalent Iodine: New Reagents and Functionalization of Peptides

Eliott Hugo Joran Le Du

Alkynes are found in a multitude of natural or synthetic bioactive compounds. In addition to the capacity of these chemical motifs to impact the physicochemical properties of a molecule of interest, the well-established reactivity of alkynes makes them ide ...

EPFL2023

Hydrogen Peroxide Formation during Ozonation of Olefins and Phenol: Mechanistic Insights from Oxygen Isotope Signatures

Urs von Gunten, Joanna Maria Houska

Mitigation of undesired byproducts from ozonation of dissolved organic matter (DOM) such as aldehydes and ketones is currently hampered by limited knowledge of their precursors and formation pathways. Here, the stable oxygen isotope composition of H2O2 for ...

AMER CHEMICAL SOC2023

Identifying the mediators of intracellular E. coli inactivation under UVA light: The (photo) Fenton process and singlet oxygen

César Pulgarin, Stefanos Giannakis

Solar disinfection (SODIS) was probed for its underlying mechanism. When Escherichia coli was exposed to UVA irradiation, the dominant solar fraction acting in SODIS process, cells exhibited a shoulder before death ensued. This profile resembles cell killi ...

PERGAMON-ELSEVIER SCIENCE LTD2022

Photochemical oxidation of phenols and anilines mediated by phenoxyl radicals in aqueous solution

Silvio Canonica, Urs von Gunten, Stephanie Christa Remke

Reactive intermediates formed upon irradiation of chromophoric dissolved organic matter (CDOM) contribute to the degradation of various organic contaminants in surface waters. Besides well-studied "short-lived" photo oxidants, such as triplet state CDOM (3 ...

PERGAMON-ELSEVIER SCIENCE LTD2022