Our waterways are becoming more and more polluted due to PFAS, plastics, medicines, drugs, and new chemicals made by companies that just hand over the responsibility of cleaning to plants paid for by public moneys. Detecting the different chemicals and filtering them out if getting harder and harder. Could the simple solution of heating up past a point where even PFAS/forever chemicals decomposes (400C for PFAS, 500C to be more sure about other stuff) be alright?
At the risk of sounding silly - Instead of focusing on burning the solids, boil the water. Water boils at 100C, at which point the water vapor should separate and leave all the solids behind. Then capture the vapors and condense it back down into clean water. Now, if you later want to incinerate the leftover solids, sure, go for it, fire’s always cool in my book.
I’ll add, simply boiling water is energy intensive. What you are proposing probably won’t work at any scale.
Golly gee, if only there were some form of energy generation that required boiling vast amounts of water to turn into steam. But no, that would be silly.
You definitely wouldn’t want to drink the water from any of those systems you’re describing though :)
I think you’re doing fire wrong, friendo.
I thought about this too for a while but I learned that even rain contains microplastics.
That might be possible but there are particles that also will be present in vapor which might be toxic. Simply sending the out into the atmosphere would probably not be a good idea. PFAS for example do not break down under ~400C and just creating a fine PFAS mist is probably not what we want.
But yes, of course while heating up the water there will be residue. How to dispose of that will probably also have to be thought of. Maybe 500C is also the answer, but I don’t know.
Yeah, turning wastewater plants into sewage distilleries doesn’t seem like a public health win.
What exactly do you think evaporation ponds are doing, then?
Evaporation is a component of distilling, but if you don’t capture the vapor and condense it it’s just evaporation.
Why would you capture it? It’s waste water, evaporation into the atmosphere should be fine.
Because if you capture it you’re distilling instead of evaporating. I’m just pointing out the difference between the two. If you read further up, you will see that I don’t think it’s a good idea.
Distillation doesn’t have to be of water. Not all impurities are solid. And the evaporated water does go back into the water pool, just with steps we aren’t directly involved in.
Has any ody suggesting distillation?
I cannot comprehend things for you.
But you can make them up?
There might be things in the vapor that haven’t decomposed or that have decomposed, are toxic, and become airborne.
Like what? Heavy metals would precipitate, organic compounds would break down. (I’m not a chemist, just have general science background).