Methods and Apparatuses for Advanced Drinking Water Treatment

More and more clean and safe drinking water will be needed due to the explosive population growth and water pollution, as well as people's increasing demands for better life quality. In response to this problem, various kinds of drinking water treatment approaches have been developed over the past decade. As a result, diversified water purifiers with patents appeared on the market. This paper analyzes recent researches and developments of advanced drinking water treatment, and seeks to offer a scientific and technical overview of dramatic trend and useful information to researchers who work in this field. Potential methods and popular apparatuses with patents are discussed first, especially those novel processes using membranes. Compared with ozonation, electrolysis and photocatalysis process, membrane technology shows enormous application potential and bright development prospect in the field of advanced drinking water treatment. The advantages of novel membrane processes include extremely high quality of water, nature friendly, cost effectiveness and easy operation. Therefore, commercial point-of-use water purifiers with membrane module are becoming more popular on the market. With a view to the membrane fouling in water purifiers, progresses on available filtration media prior to membrane separation are also discussed, such as copper/zinc redox alloy (KDF) and activated carbon fiber (ACF). These typical filtration medias have played a dual role in both alleviating membrane fouling and enhancing water quality.