TADOX: TERI Advanced Oxidation Technology for Wastewater Treatment and Reuse

With the water crisis looming large and freshwater availability increasingly becoming scarce and costlier, it becomes imperative for Industries & Utilities to reuse ‘treated water’; however, with current treatment practices, the quality of treated wastewater is not ‘adequate’, to be reused in high-end application areas like cooling tower, boilers, Industrial processes like the water for formulations, manufacturing, construction etc. Fresh ground water is still required, or the water being recovered from tertiary treatment systems utilizing RO and Multi Effect Evaporators (MEE), which incur huge land and O&M costs together being highly energy intensive and unsustainable. Therefore, it is required to integrate in current systems, novel approaches and advanced technologies which reduce overall load on tertiary treatment trail and help achieve Zero Liquid Discharge (ZLD) in a much affordable and sustainable manner. In this pursuit, The Energy and Resources Institute (TERI), New Delhi has developed a novel technology called TERI Advanced Oxidation Technology (TADOX®), which provides treatment of wastewater stream containing high color, COD, BOD, TOC, dissolved organics, micropollutants, non-biodegradable and persistent organic pollutants (POPs) in effluents from grossly polluted industries and modern-day municipal sewage.

TADOX involves novel approaches which make very less use of chemicals in the overall treatment leading to bare minimum and non-toxic sludge preventing secondary pollution. The secondary treatment involves Photocatalysis as an Advanced Oxidation Process (AOP), leading to oxidative degradation and mineralization of targeted pollutants. The TADOX treated colorless and high-quality water going to subsequent RO may prevent bio-fouling of membranes, enhance life span and efficiency of RO systems and reduce overall load on subsequent evaporators like MEE and MVR etc. enabling sustainable and affordable ZLD compliance with 85-90% enhanced water reusability. Further, having small footprint, few hours treatment time and together with resource & energy efficiency, the overall treatment is expected to bring down OPEX by 30-40% than current values.

The technology has been chosen by National Mission for Clean Ganga (NMCG), Ministry of Jal Shakti for ‘Namami Gange Program’ to treat some selected polluting streams. NMCG and TERI have signed a MoU in this regard. TADOX is selected by the Office of the Principal Scientific Advisor, GoI under CKIC-DRIIV (City Knowledge Innovation Cluster-Delhi Research Implementation and Innovation) for Wastewater Management. Very recently TADOX has won the 1st prize in the ‘Innovations in Water Technology’ category of the prestigious FICCI Water Awards2022.