Process to protect the environment and population

A large variety of processes are studied and developed aiming at the removal or degradation of targeted compounds (trace level, refractory, toxic, …) in real conditions (complex mixtures and effluents, non-ideal behaviors …) in both water and air.

Some processes do simply remove or transfer the pollutant (adsorption, absorption, menbrane separation), other processes will degrade or transform the targeted compound (chlorination, ozonation, advanced oxydation process).

Image describing a plasma-photocatalytic reactor for air treatment

Physical, Chemical and Biological Treaments

Some processes do simply remove or transfer the pollutant :

adsorption using Activated Carbon (grains, cloths, ..) or other adsorbents (Giraudet et al., 2014; Fallou et al., 2014)
gas-liquid absorption based on aqueous or non-aqueous liquids (Azizi et al., 2015)
membrane processes

Some processes will degrade or transform the targeted compound :

“advanced oxidation” processes, i.e. using highly reactive radical species :
Ozone/H2O2, H2O2/UV, … (Biard et al., 2011)
Fenton and Fenton-like, heterogeneous catalysis (Minella et al., 2014)
photocatalysis, plasma, … (Assadi et al., 2014)
chemical and electrochemical oxidation (Saidi et al., 2014) or reduction (Fontmorin et al., 2014)
biological treatment and any combination of these processes. (Yahiaoui et al., 2014)

The research focuses on improving efficiency (chemical, energetic, environmental…), modeling and process up-scaling from lab to pilot units and prototypes.