In this study, the physicochemical characteristics and fluoride adsorption capacity of the bone char pyrolyzed at different temperatures; 200℃, 300℃, 350℃, 400℃, 500℃, 600℃, and 700℃ were investigated. Analytical studies of the synthesized bone char including; SEM-EDS, XRD, BET and FT-IR, showed the presence of hydroxyapatite(HAP), which is the main substance that adsorbs fluoride from aqueous solutions containing high fluoride concentrations. Bone char pyrolyzed from 350∼700℃ specifically revealed that, the lower the temperature, the higher the fluoride adsorption capacity and vice versa. The loss of the fluoride adsorption function of HAP (OH- band in the FTIR analysis) was interpreted as the main reason behind this inverse correlation between temperature and fluoride adsorption. Bone char produced at 350°C hence exhibited a fluoride adsorption capacity of 10.56 mgF/g, resulting in significantly higher adsorption compared to previous studies.
The proper operation and safety management of water and wastewater treatment systems are essential for providing stable water service to the public. However, various natural disasters including floods, large storms, volcano eruptions and earthquakes threaten public water services by causing serious damage to water and wastewater treatment plants and pipeline systems. Korea is known as a country that is relatively safe from earthquakes, but the recent increase in the frequency of earthquakes has increased the need for a proper earthquake management system. Interest in research and the establishment of legal regulations has increased, especially since the large earthquake in Gyeongju in 2016. Currently, earthquakes in Korea are managed by legal regulations and guidelines integrated with other disasters such as floods and large storms. The legal system has long been controlled and relatively well managed, but technical research has made limited progress since it was considered in the past that Korea is safe from earthquake damage. Various technologies, including seismic design and earthquake forecasting, are required to minimize possible damages from earthquakes, so proper research is essential. This paper reviews the current state of technology development and legal management systems to prevent damages and restore water and wastewater treatment systems after earthquakes in Korea and other countries. High technologies such as unmanned aerial vehicles, wireless networks and real-time monitoring systems are already being applied to water and wastewater treatment processes, and to further establish the optimal system for earthquake response in water and wastewater treatment facilities, continuous research in connection with the Fourth Industrial Revolution, including information and communications technologies, is essential.
With growing expectations for economic cooperation between the two Koreas, there is much interest in participating in the construction of infrastructure in North Korea. In particular, water and sewage infrastructure is the four major social infrastructures in addition to housing, transportation, electricity and telecommunications. North Korea is known to have severe water pollution and ecosystem destruction in major rivers, water pollution and soil pollution in mining areas are serious, and water and sewage infrastructures in cities other than Pyongyang are known to be weak. Preemptive investment in water supply and drainage in North Korea is the foundation for securing the quality of life of the North Korean and is the foundation of public health and industry. It is a leading investment to reduce the cost of unification and is a new growth engine for the water reloded industry. In this study, we proposed a plan to exchange and cooperate in water environment for building water infrastructure of North Korea by examining the data related to water quality, water resources, water disaster, related legal system and human resources exchange situations in North Korea.
Turbidity has various effects on the water quality and ecosystem of a river. High turbidity during floods increases the operation cost of a drinking water supply system. Thus, the management of turbidity is essential for providing safe water to the public. There have been various efforts to estimate turbidity in river systems for proper management and early warning of high turbidity in the water supply process. Advanced data analysis technology using machine learning has been increasingly used in water quality management processes. Artificial neural networks(ANNs) is one of the first algorithms applied, where the overfitting of a model to observed data and vanishing gradient in the backpropagation process limit the wide application of ANNs in practice. In recent years, deep learning, which overcomes the limitations of ANNs, has been applied in water quality management. LSTM(Long-Short Term Memory) is one of novel deep learning algorithms that is widely used in the analysis of time series data. In this study, LSTM is used for the prediction of high turbidity(>30 NTU) in a river from the relationship of turbidity to discharge, which enables early warning of high turbidity in a drinking water supply system. The model showed 0.98, 0.99, 0.98 and 0.99 for precision, recall, F1-score and accuracy respectively, for the prediction of high turbidity in a river with 2 hour frequency data. The sensitivity of the model to the observation intervals of data is also compared with time periods of 2 hour, 8 hour, 1 day and 2 days. The model shows higher precision with shorter observation intervals, which underscores the importance of collecting high frequency data for better management of water resources in the future.
Even though sewers have been conventionally designed to prevent from sediment deposition using a specified minimum velocity or shear stress at a particular depth of flow or with a particular frequency of occurrence, it was appreciated that these methods do not consider the characteristics and concentration of the sediment and the specific hydraulic conditions of the sewer with sediment. In this study, a densimetric Froude number formula was suggested considering particle diameter and volumetric concentration of the sediment as well as flow depth and flowrate, based on several domestic field inspections, which was compared with other formulas proposed by previous investigators. When the sediment concentration was not considered, the calibration coefficient of 0.125-1.5 to the densimetric Froude numbers of this study was needed to obtain the similar ones with previous investigators’. For the densimetric Froude number formula obtained with consideration of sediment concentration, the exponent value of term Cv was almost the same as that of previous results and that of d50/Rh was similar for Fr < 2.2.
Due to global climate change, Korea is experiencing flooding and drought severely. It is hard to manage water resources because intensive precipitation during short periods and drought are commonly occurred in Korea, recently. Severe drought occurred in 2015 and 2017 in the islands, and coastal and inland areas in Korea, and the citizens experienced decreased water supply and emergency water service by using bottled water. Therefore, the Korean government provided additional governmental funds such as the grant of drought disaster. In this study, we tried to calculate the cost of water for drought response based on the cost of tap water for the regional local governments in Korea and the grant of drought disaster by the Ministry of the Interior and Safety in Korea, etc. The estimated costs of water for drought responses in coastal and inland areas which have a chance to apply alternative water sources such as brackish or seawater desalination and water reuse in Korea were higher than in other areas in Korea. Additionally, as the novel approach of drought response, the 300 m3/day-scale desalination vessel was suggested to provide desalinated water for the islands in Korea. The estimated expenses of water supply for the target island areas (Sinan-gun and Jindo-gun) by the desalination vessel was lower than those by emergency water service by using bottled water.
Tetracycline is one of the most commonly used antibiotics in domestic and foreign livestock industries to suppress the growth of pathogens. Tetracycline has been reported as a non-biodegradable compound. Therefore it has been not completely removed in the sewage treatment process. In this study, tetracycline was degraded using liquid ferrate (VI). Based on these experiments, the optimal water condition (pH and water temperature) were selected, appropriate liquid ferrate (VI) dosage was calculated, and finally the degradation pathway was estimated with the intermediate products detected by LC/MS/MS. All degradation experiments were completed within 30 seconds and the optimal condition was obtained in basic condition (pH 10) at room temperature (20℃). And the appropriate molar ratio between tetracycline and liquid ferrate (VI) was 12.5:1. Finally, 12 intermediate products were detected with LC/MS/MS and the degradation pathways and the degradation pathways and proposed the degradation pathways.
This study investigated the degradation characteristics and biodegradability of phenol, refractory organic matters, by injecting MgO and CaO-known to be catalyst materials for the ozonation process-into a Dielectric Barrier Discharge (DBD) plasma. MgO and CaO were injected at 0, 0.5, 1.0, and 2 g/L, and the pH was not adjusted separately to examine the optimal injection amounts of MgO and CaO. When MgO and CaO were injected, the phenol decomposition rate was increased, and the reaction time was found to decrease by 2.1 to 2.6 times. In addition, during CaO injection, intermediate products combined with Ca2+ to cause precipitation, which increased the COD (chemical oxygen demand) removal rate by approximately 2.4 times. The biodegradability of plasma treated water increased with increase in the phenol decomposition rate and increased as the amount of the generated intermediate products increased. The biodegradability was the highest in the plasma reaction with MgO injection as compared to when the DBD plasma pH was adjusted. Thus, it was found that a DBD plasma can degrade non-biodegradable phenols and increase biodegradability.