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ORIGINAL RESEARCH article
Front. Environ. Sci.
Sec. Water and Wastewater Management
Volume 13 - 2025 | doi: 10.3389/fenvs.2025.1536359
This article is part of the Research Topic Mitigating Microbial Contamination of Drinking Water Sources View all articles
Uncertainty analysis of field trials of low-cost Bi-TiO 2 -P25 solar photocatalyst for sustainable water treatment
Provisionally accepted- 1 School of Chemistry, University of Edinburgh, Edingburgh, Scotland, United Kingdom
- 2 Swiss Federal Institute of Technology Lausanne, Lausanne, Vaud, Switzerland
- 3 School of Engineering, University of Edinburgh, Edinburgh, Scotland, United Kingdom
Solar photocatalysis has the potential to reduce chemical and microbial contaminants in water and make it safer for consumption in an effective and sustainable manner. This has been studied and proven well under laboratory-scale conditions. In our previous work, the developed solar photocatalyst, Bi-TiO 2 -P25 has been tested for its efficiency in reducing total coliform from natural waters under solar light. Along with the promising results (up to 99% reduction of total coliform and 99.9% reduction of Escherichia coli in two hours), the uncertainties due to environmental factors associated with the process were also observed. The reaction rate was largely impacted by the change in sunlight intensity over the treatment or different initial concentrations of contaminants in natural water. Therefore, it becomes essential to understand how the performance would be impacted in such varied conditions to predict the optimum results. This paper discusses how the treatment time could be impacted by uncertainties affecting either the kinetic rate constant, or the initial concentration of bacteria, or both, as well as external factors such as solar intensity and other randomly varying factors during the treatment. Mathematically exact results are derived and future development trends, and challenges are discussed while providing a prospective outlook for the deployment of solar photocatalysis at pilot scale.
Keywords: Derived distribution simulations, Solar photocatalysis, Sustainable water treatment, photocatalytic oxidation, stochastic process
Received: 28 Nov 2024; Accepted: 21 Feb 2025.
Copyright: © 2025 Arora, Calvani, Chatzisymeon, Robertson and Perona. This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (CC BY). The use, distribution or reproduction in other forums is permitted, provided the original author(s) or licensor are credited and that the original publication in this journal is cited, in accordance with accepted academic practice. No use, distribution or reproduction is permitted which does not comply with these terms.
* Correspondence:
Ayushi Arora, School of Chemistry, University of Edinburgh, Edingburgh, EH8 9YL, Scotland, United Kingdom
Giulio Calvani, Swiss Federal Institute of Technology Lausanne, Lausanne, 1015, Vaud, Switzerland
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