Federal Institute of Hydrology (BfG), D-56068, Koblenz, Am Mainzer Tor 1, Germany; DVGW Water Technology Center Karlsruhe (TZW), D-76139, Karlsruhe, Karlsruher Str. 84, Germany.
Federal Institute of Hydrology (BfG), D-56068, Koblenz, Am Mainzer Tor 1, Germany; Bavarian Environment Agency, D-86179, Augsburg, Bürgermeister-Ulrich-Str. 160, Germany.
Water Res. 2019 Oct 15;163:114842. doi: 10.1016/j.watres.2019.07.009. Epub 2019 Jul 5.
Strategies to determine the removal efficiency of micropollutants in wastewater treatment plants (WWTPs) are widely discussed. Especially the evaluation of the potential benefit of further advanced treatment steps such as an additional tertiary treatment based on ozonation or activated carbon have come into focus. Such evaluation strategies are often based on the removal behavior of known micropollutants via target or suspected analysis. The utilization of nontarget analysis is considered to lead to a more comprehensive picture as also unknown or not expected micropollutants are analyzed. Here, the results of an evaluation via target and nontarget analysis were compared for biological treatment (BT) processes of eleven full-scale WWTPs and three different post-treatments (PTs): one sand filter (SF) and two granular activated carbon (GAC) filters. The similarity of the determined removals from target and nontarget analysis of the BTs increased significantly by excluding easily degradable "features" from the nontarget evaluation. A similar ranking of the removal trends for the BTs could also be achieved by comparing this new subset of nontarget features with a set of nine readily to moderately biodegradable micropollutants. This observation suggests that a performance ranking of BTs based either on target or nontarget analysis is plausible. In contrast to the BTs, the evaluation of the three PTs revealed that the difference of feature removal between SF and the two GACs was small, but large for the target analytes with substantially higher removal effciencies for the GACs compared to the SF. In addition to the removal behavior, the nontarget analysis provided further information about the number and quantity of transformation products (TPs) in the effluent from the BTs. For all BTs more than half (55-67%) of the features detected in the effluent were not found in the influent. A comparable proportion of TPs was also detected after GAC and sand filtration due to their microbial activities.
广泛讨论了确定废水处理厂（WWTP）中微污染物去除效率的策略。特别是评估基于臭氧或活性炭的额外三级处理等进一步先进处理步骤的潜在益处已经成为焦点。此类评估策略通常基于通过目标或疑似分析对已知微污染物的去除行为。利用非目标分析被认为可以提供更全面的情况，因为也会分析未知或未预期的微污染物。在这里，通过目标和非目标分析对十一个全规模 WWTP 和三种不同后处理（PT）的生物处理（BT）过程进行了评估结果进行了比较：一个砂滤器（SF）和两个颗粒活性炭（GAC）过滤器。通过从非目标评估中排除易降解的“特征”，BT 中非目标分析确定的去除率的相似性显著增加。通过将此非目标特征的新子集与一组 9 种易生物降解或中等生物降解的微污染物进行比较，也可以实现对 BT 去除趋势的相似排序。这一观察结果表明，基于目标或非目标分析对 BT 进行性能排名是合理的。与 BT 相比，对三种 PT 的评估表明，SF 和两个 GAC 之间的特征去除差异较小，但对于目标分析物而言，GAC 的去除效率大大高于 SF，差异较大。除了去除行为外，非目标分析还提供了有关 BT 出水中转化产物（TP）数量和数量的进一步信息。对于所有 BT，在出水中检测到的特征中，有超过一半（55-67%）未在进水口中发现。由于其微生物活性，在 GAC 和砂滤之后也检测到了可比比例的 TPs。
