Degradation and Separation of Perfluorooctanoic Acid (PFOA)

Perfluorooctanoic acid (PFOA), a perfluorinated alkylated substances (PFAS) has been identified
by the US EPA as detrimental to human health. Its consumption is related to thyroid disease, and
increased kidney and testicular cancer. PFAS is estimated to be present in the blood of almost all
residents of the United States (USGS Report, 2022). PFOA is ubiquitous across many consumer
and household items including non-stick and stain-resistant products and in fact, West Virginia
waterbodies record 101-349 ng/L PFOA. This project intends to use membrane technology to
remove PFOA from the water as well as microwave technology to degrade it and combine these
technologies in the future to obtain a one-step separation process. The methodology followed
consisted in testing 4 different types of membranes with a 10mg/L PFOA solution; PES 5K, NF
270, NF 90, and BW 30, and collecting their feed, permeate, and retentate in order to calculate
their permeability flux and rejection towards PFOA. It was observed that the membranes PES 5K
and NF 270 had the highest rejection. While preliminary microwave experiments showed little or
no degradation of PFOA, we hypothesize that adsorption of PFOA on suitable sorbents can
facilitate higher degradation efficiencies. Therefore, current efforts are focused on adsorbing
PFOA on zeolite H-ZSM-5 SAR 23 and then microwaving it for its degradation. Future work
will involve combining membrane-based separation with microwave degradation to enable a
one-step reactive separation process.