Degradation of polyacrylamide aqueous solution by UV/H2O2/O3 process

ENVR 285

Ting Liu, tomlucy2005@yahoo.cn, Hong You, yokelist@vip.sina.com, Huihui Luo, and Meiling Wang. Department of Environmental Science and Engineering, Harbin Institute of Technology, No. 202 Haihe Road, Nangang Dist, Harbin, 150090, China
In order to prevent the produced water containing polyacrylamide (PAM) from contaminating the ground water wells in tertiary oil recovery processes, the batch reactor with numerous lamp-house was developed and degradation of PAM solution by UV/H2O2/O3 processes was studied in this reactor. Also, the effects of operating parameters such as hydrogen peroxide dosage, ozone dosage and initial PAM concentration were investigated. Both O3 and H2O2 had optimum dosages; once exceeding optimum dosages, the degradation ratio decreased. When H2O2 dosage exceeded 27.8 mg/min, the UV/H2O2/O3 process was less effective than the treatment with UV/O3. In addition, the degradation ratio decreased with increasing initial PAM concentration. The UV/H2O2/O3 process could effectively decrease the molecular weight of PAM solution from 5,000,000 to few thousands and increase the PAM solution biodegradability from 0.15 to 0.44. It was found that PAM can be degraded efficiently by UV/H2O2/O3 processes.