SusChEM: Advancing Biocatalytic Technology for the Treatment of Emerging Contaminants in Drinking Water

University Of Illinois At Urbana-Champaign, Urbana IL

Investigators

Abstract

PI: Zilles Proposal: 1705804 Emerging drinking water contaminants, such as antibiotics and hormones, affect people's health at extremely low concentrations, making it challenging to remove them and provide safe drinking water. The overarching goal of this work is to protect public health by removing emerging contaminants from drinking water using a new approach: biological catalysts. The engineering benefits and technical feasibility of this approach have been demonstrated, but it is currently too expensive to implement. This project will investigate different strategies for retaining or recovering biological catalysts so they can be reused many times. Achieving biological catalyst reuse has the potential to greatly reduce the costs for public utilities to remove emerging contaminants and provide safe drinking water to consumers. A biocatalytic (i.e., enzyme-based) approach would allow environmental engineers to draw on the unparalleled specificity and affinity of biological enzymes for the degradation of emerging contaminants under mild conditions. A major barrier to the application of biocatalysts in high volume, low value product industries like drinking water has been their high cost. To reduce costs, biocatalyst reuse has been identified as a key research priority. To address this need, the PIs will investigate pathways for retaining or recovering biocatalysts in a drinking water treatment process. The approach integrates molecular biology, experimental measurements, process modeling, and quantitative sustainable design to provide a comprehensive foundation advancing the development of biocatalytic technologies for drinking water treatment. The hypotheses being tested are that biocatalyst immobilization i) can be accomplished and ii) will allow sufficient rounds of reuse to make biocatalyst acquisition costs financially viable for drinking water utilities. To test these hypotheses, perchlorate-degrading biocatalysts will be immobilized using three different strategies, followed by measurements of their activity and reuse potential in batch and column experiments. The experimental results will be used to develop process models for biocatalytic treatment of perchlorate, and these models will be integrated into a sustainable design framework leveraging life cycle assessment (LCA), life cycle costing (LCC), and techno-economic analysis (TEA). Results from this project will provide a firm foundation for the application of biocatalytic technologies in water treatment by investigating the effects of different immobilization strategies on biocatalyst activity and longevity, integrating that understanding into process-scale models, and applying quantitative sustainable design to evaluate the economic and environmental tradeoffs associated with different immobilization strategies and process designs. Overall, this work will contribute to safe drinking water by developing a biocatalytic treatment technology that specifically targets perchlorate and chlorite. More generally, this work could transform our approach to emerging contaminants by providing proof of concept for the overall feasibility of biocatalytic approaches in water treatment, providing a vast new toolbox to environmental engineers and facilitating safe water reuse. Interdisciplinary education of undergraduate and graduate students is embedded in the project, and specific educational objectives are designed to increase awareness of emerging contaminants and biological treatment processes, recruit a diverse student population, and improve the communication skills of undergraduate and graduate engineering students.