Thermal monitoring for control of adsorptive based clean-up in water treatment

A sensor based technique for monitoring adsorptive based clean-up in water treatment has been developed. The approach is based on monitoring the thermal effects of a partial desorption of adsorbed material resulting from a temperature change generated by a pulsed energy input. Results reported for the adsorption of phenol onto a packed bed of granular activated carbon (GAC) show that the extent of the bed saturation can be followed by measuring this thermal effect using a simple thermistor circuit. Although the signal produced is complex a neural network based model can be used to simply correlate sensor response with column breakthrough measurements.