Why is ozone indispensable for wastewater treatment?

With the rapid development of industry today, wastewater treatment has become a key issue in the field of environmental protection. If a large amount of wastewater containing complex pollutants is discharged into the environment without effective treatment, it will cause serious damage to the ecosystem. As a powerful oxidant, ozone is gradually becoming an indispensable key element in the wastewater treatment process.
Ozone, with the chemical formula O₃, is an allotrope of oxygen and has extremely strong oxidizing properties. In wastewater treatment, its strong oxidizing properties are fully exerted. Ozone can react with a variety of pollutants in wastewater, whether it is organic compounds, pathogens, or metal ions, it is difficult to escape its "attack". When ozone comes into contact with these pollutants, it will quickly decompose and release oxygen atoms with strong oxidizing properties. These oxygen atoms are like "clean guards" that "besiege" pollutants, break the complex molecular structure, and convert it into less harmful substances, such as carbon dioxide, water or other neutral byproducts.
The advantages of ozone in wastewater treatment are extremely significant. The first is its excellent disinfection ability. In killing bacteria, viruses and other microorganisms, ozone is more efficient than traditional disinfectants such as chlorine. The wastewater disinfected by ozone has safer water quality and no harmful chemicals remain. Taking hospital wastewater treatment as an example, hospital wastewater contains a large number of pathogens. If not handled properly, it is very easy to cause disease transmission. Using ozone for disinfection can quickly and effectively kill various pathogens, providing safety guarantees for subsequent wastewater discharge or reuse.
From an environmental protection perspective, ozone treatment of wastewater is also very advantageous. Unlike disinfectants such as chlorine, ozone will decompose into oxygen after completing the oxidation reaction, and will not leave harmful chemical residues in the environment. This means that when ozone-treated wastewater is discharged, it will not cause secondary pollution to the environment such as water bodies and soil, which is in line with the current development concept of green environmental protection.
The application range of ozone treatment of wastewater is very wide. In the printing and dyeing industry, wastewater usually contains a large number of dyes with chromophores such as diazo, azo or benzene rings, resulting in extremely high chromaticity of wastewater. Ozone can destroy the structure of these chromophores with its strong oxidizing properties, decolorizing wastewater. Experimental data show that for wastewater containing hydrophilic dyes, the decolorization effect can reach more than 95% by using 20-50 mg/L of ozone for 10-30 minutes. In the chemical and pharmaceutical industries, wastewater often contains highly toxic pollutants such as phenol and cyanide. Ozone can oxidize phenol into carbon dioxide and water, gradually oxidize cyanide into slightly toxic cyanate, and finally decompose into carbon dioxide and nitrogen. When treating phenol-containing wastewater, theoretically, only 7.14 parts of ozone are required for every 1 part of phenol oxidized.
Although ozone has many advantages in wastewater treatment, it is not perfect. Its production process consumes a lot of electricity, which makes the operating cost relatively high. In addition, ozone is unstable and cannot be stored for a long time. It must be prepared at the site of use, which increases the complexity of system settings to a certain extent. Moreover, ozone is highly corrosive and has high material requirements for treatment equipment.
With the continuous advancement of science and technology, these problems are expected to be gradually solved. For example, by developing more efficient ozone generation technology to reduce energy consumption and developing new corrosion-resistant materials to increase the service life of equipment. I believe that in the future, ozone will play a more important role in the field of wastewater treatment and protect our ecological environment.