Publications associées à Design methodology accounting for the effects of porous medium heterogeneity on hydraulic residence time and biodegradation in horizontal subsurface flow constructed wetlands

Monitoring an Emergent Pathogen at Low Incidence in Wastewater Using qPCR: Mpox in Switzerland

Wastewater-based epidemiology offers a complementary approach to clinical case-based surveillance of emergent diseases and can help identify regions with infected people to prioritize clinical surveillance strategies. However, tracking emergent diseases in ...

2024

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

Periodate activation with copper oxide nanomaterials for the degradation of ciprofloxacin- A new insight into the efficiency and mechanisms

Shaoxian Li, Xi Zhang

In this study, CuO was synthesized using a facile precipitation method and was characterized using various techniques for the efficient activation of periodate (PI). Compared to systems consisting of PI alone (0.5 mM) and CuO alone (0.5 g/L), the CuO (0.5 ...

ELSEVIER SCI LTD2023

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

Functional and structural characterization of polyphosphate-accumulating organisms in aerobic granular biofilms

Arnaud Michel Gelb

The "Aerobic Granular Sludge" (AGS) technology for wastewater treatment is based on dense microbial biofilm in the form of granular aggregates that have an excellent settling property allowing high biomass concentrations in bioreactors. This promising biol ...

EPFL2023

A Survey of Industrial N-nitrosamine Discharges in Switzerland

Florian Frédéric Vincent Breider, Caroline Gachet Aquillon, Urs von Gunten

N-nitrosamines are formed during different industrial processes and are of significant concern due to their carcinogenic and mutagenic properties. This study reports concentrations of N-nitrosamines in eight different industrial wastewater treatment plants ...

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

Addressing the challenges of homogeneity, quality control and waste handling in soil bio-cementation: A large-scale experiment

Lyesse Laloui, Dimitrios Terzis, Ray Harran

In an attempt to go beyond the conventional laboratory experiments widely reported in literature around the emerging technique of soil bio-cementation, this work addresses key challenges related to its large-scale application. Precisely, a state-of-the-art ...

JAPANESE GEOTECHNICAL SOC2023

Learning Robust and Adaptive Representations: from Interactions, for Interactions

Yuejiang Liu

Interactions are ubiquitous in our world, spanning from social interactions between human individuals to physical interactions between robots and objects to mechanistic interactions among different components of an intelligent system. Despite their prevale ...

EPFL2023

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

Ozonation of lake water and wastewater: Identification of carbonous and nitrogenous carbonyl-containing oxidation byproducts by non-target screening

Urs von Gunten, Joanna Maria Houska

Ozonation of drinking water and wastewater is accompanied by the formation of disinfection byproducts (DBPs) such as low molecular weight aldehydes and ketones from the reactions of ozone with dissolved organic matter (DOM). By applying a recently develope ...

PERGAMON-ELSEVIER SCIENCE LTD2023

Making Computer Vision Models Robust and Adaptive

Shuqing Teresa Yeo

Visual perception is indispensable for many real-world applications. However, perception models deployed in the real world will encounter numerous and unpredictable distribution shifts, for example, changes in geographic locations, motion blur, and adverse ...

EPFL2023

Influence of pore-scale heterogeneity on the precipitation patterns in Microbially Induced Calcite Precipitation (MICP)

Ariadni Elmaloglou

The principle of tailoring material properties to improve the mechanical behaviour of soils through compaction or cement grouting dates to the 60s. The increasing trends of urbanization worldwide require new solutions for the development of resilient and s ...

EPFL2023

Toward biocontrol of waterborne pathogens: contributions of protists to virus removal and associated mechanisms

Margot Ninon Lauren Olive

Human viruses are widespread in the water environment and pose a risk to human health. Wastewater effluents represent the main source of viruses discharge in the environment, leading to contamination of aquatic ecosystems. Viral pathogens can persist on th ...

EPFL2022

Wastewater microorganisms impact microbial diversity and important ecological functions of stream periphyton

Kristin Schirmer, Ahmed Tlili

Effluents of wastewater treatment plants can impact microbial communities in the receiving streams. However, little is known about the role of microorganisms in wastewater as opposed to other wastewater constituents, such as nutrients and micropollutants. ...

Pergamon-Elsevier Science Ltd2022

Pretreatment options for micropollutant abatement before aquifer recharge in drinking water production: Assessment of UV/H2O2 and dense membranes

Robin Wünsch

Micropollutants (MP) such as residues of pharmaceuticals, industrial chemicals or pesticides can be detected in almost all water resources. Various processes can be used to abate them in drinking water treatment, e.g., ozonation, advanced oxidation process ...

EPFL2022

Approximate analytical solutions for assessing the effects of unsaturated flow on seawater extent in thin unconfined coastal aquifers

David Andrew Barry, Zhaoyang Luo

This study develops approximate analytical solutions for seawater extent in unconfined coastal aquifers considering unsaturated flow, and assuming steady-state, sharp-interface conditions, for both constant flux (flux-controlled aquifers) and constant head ...

2022

Assessment of the Lightning Performance of overhead distribution lines based on Lightning Location Systems data

Farhad Rachidi-Haeri

This article presents the Lightning Performance (LP) assessment of a realistic portion of the Italian distribution network with the use of probability distributions for lightning parameters inferred from local data recorded by a Lightning Location System ( ...

2022

Ozonation of organic compounds in water and wastewater: A critical review

Urs von Gunten, Sung Eun Lim

Ozonation has been applied in water treatment for more than a century, first for disinfection, later for oxidation of inorganic and organic pollutants. In recent years, ozone has been increasingly applied for enhanced municipal wastewater treatment for eco ...

PERGAMON-ELSEVIER SCIENCE LTD2022

Reactions of amines with ozone and chlorine: Two novel oxidative methods to evaluate the N-DBP formation potential from dissolved organic nitrogen

Karim-Alexandre Essaied, Urs von Gunten, Lucy Victoria Brown

The composition of oxidant-reactive dissolved organic nitrogen (DON) is poorly characterized, although its ozonation is likely to form a great variety of disinfection by-products containing a nitrogen-oxygen bond (NDBPs). In this study, two chemical oxidat ...

PERGAMON-ELSEVIER SCIENCE LTD2022