Recent development of VUV-based processes for air pollutant degradation

Abstract

As air pollution poses a great challenge around the globe, it is essential to fashion out a way of efficiently degrading the air pollutants. Vacuum Ultraviolet (VUV)-based processes are an emerging and promising technology for environmental remediation such as air cleaning, wastewater treatment, and air/water disinfection. When VUV irradiation, photolysis, photocatalysis, and ozone-assisted oxidation are involved at the same time, it results in the fast degradation of air pollutants because of their strong oxidizing capacity. The mechanisms of how the oxidants are produced and how they react are discussed in this review. This paper focuses mainly on the three VUV-based oxidation processes including VUV photolysis, VUV combined with ozone-assisted oxidation, and VUV-PCO with emphasis on their mechanisms and applications. Also, the outlook of these processes are proposed in this paper.