Phosphate helps to recover from scavenging effect of chloride in self-enhanced ozonation.

Self-enhanced ozonation is a new approach for generation of hydroxyl radicals at low pH. Unfortunately at acidic environment chloride effectively scavenges the radicals. Therefore, the presence of chloride in ozonated medium would be detrimental for the most of the process practical applications. In self-enhanced ozonation process almost complete degradation of aromatics is observed during first 10min. Addition of 3.22 mM of chloride completely hinders degradation of nitrobenzene (NB) or benzoic acid (BA). This work shows that the scavenging effect of chlorides may be overcome with an excess of phosphate. Addition of 50 mM of phosphates to ozonated water brings back 74% removal of NB or 87% of BA, when 24 μM of compound is ozonated in the presence of 3.22 mM chloride during 60min. The excess of phosphate sufficient to overcome the scavenging activity of chloride in the self-enhanced ozonation of aromatic compounds at acidic pH is much lower than that implied by the reaction rates of both ions with hydroxyl radicals. To the best of our knowledge the recovering effect of phosphate has not been shown before.