Treatment of gasoline-contaminated waters by advanced oxidation processes.

In this study, the efficiency of advanced oxidative processes (AOPs) was investigated toward the degradation of aqueous solutions containing benzene, toluene and xylenes (BTX) and gasoline-contaminated waters. The results indicated that BTX can be effectively oxidized by near UV-assisted photo-Fenton process. The treatment permits almost total degradation of BTX and removal of more than 80% of the phenolic intermediates at reaction times of about 30 min. Preliminary investigations using water contaminated by gasoline suggest a good potentiality of the process for the treatment of large volumes of aqueous samples containing these polluting species. Heterogeneous photocatalysis and H2O2/UV system show lower degradation efficiency, probably due to the heterogeneous character of the TiO2-mediated system and lost of photonic efficiency of the H2O2/UV system in the presence of highly colored intermediated.