Protonated Hydroxylamine‐Assisted Iron Catalytic Activation of Persulfate for the Rapid Removal of Persistent Organics from Wastewater

Abstract

This research aims at optimizing the effects of processing conditions, salts, natural organic materials, and water matrices quality on the effectiveness of the Fe(II)/K2S2O8/hydroxylamine process in the degradation of pararosaniline. Assisting the Fe(II)/KPS (potassium persulfate) treatment with protonated hydroxylamine (H3NOH+) increases the degradation rate of pararosaniline by more than 100%. Radical scavenger experiments show that the SO4●− radical dominates pararosaniline degradation in the Fe(II)/KPS system, whereas ●OH is the dominant reactive species in the presence of H3NOH+. The disparity in pararosaniline removal effectiveness upon the Fe(II)/KPS/H3NOH+ and Fe(II)/KPS systems gets more significant with increasing reactants doses (i.e., H3NOH+, H2O2, Fe(II)) and solution pH (2–7). Interestingly, H3NOH+ increased the working pH to 6 instead of pH 4 for the Fe(II)/KPS process. Moreover, mineral anions such as Cl−, NO3−, NO2−, and SO4− (up to 10 × 10−3 m) do not affect the efficiency of the Fe(II)/KPS/H3NOH+ process. In contrast, acid humic decreases the performance of the process by ≈20%. In natural mineral water, treated wastewater, and river water samples, the Fe(II)/KPS/H3NOH+ process maintains higher degradation performance (≈95%), whereas the process efficiency is greatly amortized in seawater. The efficiency of the Fe(II)/KPS process was drastically decreased in the various water matrices.