Study on effluent organic matter (EfOM) characteristic and removal efficiency is required, because EfOM is important in regard to the stability of effluents reuse, quality issues of artificial recharge and water conservation of aqueous system. UV technology is widely used in wastewater treatment. Many reports have been conducted on microbial disinfection and micro pollutant reduction with UV treatment. However, the study on EfOM with UV has limited because low/medium pressure UV lamp is not sufficient to affect refractory organics. The high intensity of pulsed UV would mineralize EfOM itself as well as change the characteristics of EfOM. Chlorine demand and DBPs formation is affected on the changed amounts and properties of EfOM. The objective of this study is to investigate the effect on EfOM, chlorine residual, and chlorinated DBPs formation with low pressure and pulsed UV treatment. The removal of organic matter through low pressure UV treatment is insignificant effect. Pulsed UV treatment effectively removes/transforms EfOM. As a result, the chlorine consumption is changed and chlorine DBPs formation is decreased. However, excessive UV treatment caused problems of increasing chlorine consumption and generating unknown by-products.

While a range of natural organic matter (NOM) types can generate high levels of disinfection by-products (DBPs) after chlorination, there is little understanding of which specific compounds act as precursors. Use of eight model compounds allows linking of explicit properties to treatability and DBP formation potential (DBPFP). The removal of model compounds by various treatment processes and their haloacetic acid formation potential (HAAFP) before and after treatment were recorded. The model compounds comprised a range of hydrophobic (HPO) and hydrophilic (HPI) neutral and anionic compounds. On the treatment processes, an ozone oxidation process was moderate for control of model compounds, while the HPO-neutral compound was most treatable with activated carbon process. Biodegradation was successful in removing amino acids, while coagulation and ion exchange process had little effect on neutral molecules. Although compared with the HPO compounds the HPI compounds had low HAAFP the ozone oxidation and biodegradation were capable of increasing their HAAFP. In situations where neutral or HPI molecules have high DBPFP additional treatments may be required to remove recalcitrant NOM and control DBPs.