The Relevance of a New Purification Technique for RO Isolates and its Application to Lake Biwa Water

摘要

Natural organic matter (NOM) is ubiquitously present in the aquatic environment. In order to study and elucidate its biogeochemical roles, several isolation techniques have been developed by many researchers. Reverse osmosis (RO) is a promising technique to isolate dissolved organic matter (DOM) from surface and ground waters. Advantages of RO isolation are: 1) high recovery of dissolved organic carbon (DOC) is attained, 2) the use of strong chemicals is not necessary, and 3) no heat treatment is necessary. A fatal drawback of the RO method is high recovery of inorganic species (e.g., SO4~(2-), CI~- and silica). Several techniques (dialysis, gel filtration, etc.) have been applied to overcome this problem for decades. Each technique, however, has inherent defects, namely tediously long operational period and adsorption loss of DOC.