the efficient degradation of trifluralin via electrochemically generated sodium ferrate. a green and easily scalable method

In today's world, water pollution has become a serious issue for the whole globe. unfortunately, over the past decades, due to severe population growth, industrialization, agricultural activities, and climate changes, the quality of available water resources has gradually diminished, and most of them are polluted with various compounds [1]. therefore, the water treatment processes are one of the important environmental concerns of government authorities and researchers. in the current decade, thousands of organic, inorganic and biological water pollutants are reported as dangerous compounds for humans' health, aquatic conditions, and the ecosystem [2]. trifluralin (trf) is a 2,6-dinitro herbicide. it has been extensively used in agricultural applications as a selective and pre-emergency compound in various plant cultures since the 1970s. because of existence of nitro groups, trf is a stable pollutant of food, groundwater, and surface water and there are also numerous reports evaluating trf for genotoxicity and immunotoxicity [3]. to the best of our knowledge, conventional technologies of water treatment methods are not efficient enough to completely mineralize trf to non-dangerous compounds under mild and economic conditions at a semi-industrial scale. however, the electrochemical processes offer several significant advantages over the analogous conventional techniques for the oxidation or the removal of contaminants, such as low energy requirements, in situ generation of some starting reactants, and high potential for process control [4]. on the other side, iron species are well-known abundant materials to perform scalable environmental-friendly applications (especially water treatment process). it must be noted that among the different forms of iron, ferrate (fe(vi)) salts have garnered much attention over the past several years because of their application in the coagulation/precipitation of toxic metals, the oxidative transformation of pollutants, and also the complete degradation of emerging contaminants [5]. therefore in this research project, we firstly used the constant-current electrolysis (cce) as a straightforward and cost-effective method for the generation of sodium ferrate (na2feo4) solution, and then we used the electrochemically generated ferrate for the degradation of trf under the mild conditions. in the next part, the influence of several parameters on the degradation process of trf and cod removal efficiency have been optimized. finally, the obtained data from cyclic voltammogram, uv-vis spectrum, and cod analysis of trf have perfectly confirmed the full degradation of trf to non-dangerous compounds.