Isabella Scanlan
Pronouns: she/her
Research Mentor(s): Nirala Singh
Research Mentor School/College/Department: Chemical Engineering / Engineering
Program: UROPF
Session: Session 6 (3:40pm – 4:30pm)
Authors: Wendy Yu
Abstract
As industrial production has increased over the years, so has the amount of toxic wastewater. Many harmful chemicals to humans are found in this wastewater, including phenols. Phenols contain a benzene ring with a hydroxyl (OH-) group connected to a carbon atom. They have proved to be extremely harmful to humans by damaging DNA and even having carcinogenic effects. Additionally, phenols cause irreversible damage to the environment. The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency has identified many ways to combat the presence of phenols in the water supply, the most significant being through electrochemical oxidation. During electrochemical oxidation, phenols are made benign, thus harmless to humans and the environment. The process consists of feeding electrochemical cells with phenol-contaminated wastewater. During the process, it is imperative to observe the aqueous phase adsorption of phenols on different catalyst surfaces to determine how different chemical species affect phenol’s adsorption energy. According to Sabatier’s Principle, we want to find a chemical species that does not cause phenol to have a very strong or very weak binding energy, as too much phenol adsorption will be ineffective. First, we want to measure the adsorption energy of phenol on iron oxides in different electrolyte solutions to determine how different chemical species affect phenol’s adsorption energy. We are studying iron oxides because it is an abundant element with a high adsorption rate. Therefore, we will use iron oxide as a catalyst surface to evaluate phenol’s binding energy. We did this by using UV/Vis Spectroscopy to measure the absorbance of different concentrations of phenol solutions diluted in acetic acid. We are using acetic acid because it dissociates into acetate and hydrogen ions; acetate is an ion commonly found in wastewater. By doing this research, we will learn more about phenols and how they can best be treated. In the future, we will look more into different ions like nitrate, perchlorate, and sulfate to analyze how the ions affect phenol adsorption energy.
