Life Cycle Assessment of the Removal of Nitrate from Water Using Five Environmentally Friendly Technologies
Date Issued
2010
Date
2010
Author(s)
Lee, Yu-Hung
Abstract
Nitrate, one of common contamination in nature, is widespread due to over-fertilization in agriculture. Once taken into the body, nitrates are converted into nitrites, which can interfere with the oxygen-carrying capacity of the blood. It will lead to severe shock at the worst. In recent years, catalytic reduction processes applied in the removal of nitrate in water has been proved to be an effective and economical treatment. However, some of the noble metal and nanomaterials will be used in the processes, the potential risks and impacts to the environment with catalytic reduction processes associated are viewed critically. In this study, the main purpose is to establish evaluation system of environmentally friendly by life cycle assessment (LCA) and analytic hierarchy process (AHP). With this objective a life cycle assessment has been used as a tool for the assessment of the environmental impact of five environmentally friendly processes for the removal of nitrates from water : (1)Pd-Cu/TNTs, (2)H2 + Pd-Cu/TiO2 , (3)Pd-Cu/TiO2 , (4)Pd/Zn0 , (5)Pd-Cu/Fe0.
The inventoried data has been classified considering the potential environmental impacts categories included in the Eco-indicator 99 method of SimaPro 7.1. Evaluation system of environmentally friendly considers the economic and life cycle environmental effects of process, giving these equal weighting. On the other hand, the Expert Choice has been used as an AHP tool to decide the weighting factors of environmental impacts.
Among the five cases considered, Pd-Cu/TiO2 treatment proved to have the lowest environmental impact in all the evaluation system of environmentally friendly due to the lower palladium and electricity consumptions. On the other hand, the weighting factors of environmental impacts were : ecotoxicity (9.4 %) > fossil fuels (8.9 %) > carcinogens (5.6 %) > radiation (4.5 %) > land use (4.3 %) > ozone layer (3.2 %) = climate change (3.2 %) > minerals (3.0%) > respiratory organics (2.9 %) = acidification / eutrophication (2.9 %) > respiratory inorganics (2.2 %). Although the evaluation system of environmentally friendly of the removal of nitrate from water was focused on five bench-scale treatments, it will be valuable on site in the future.
Subjects
nitrate
catalytic denitrification
environmentally friendly
LCA
AHP
Type
thesis
File(s)![Thumbnail Image]()
Loading...
Name
ntu-99-R97541136-1.pdf
Size
23.53 KB
Format
Adobe PDF
Checksum
(MD5):5c690da190e6d96b6c2ff1844f3d2f64