Abstract
The fundamental goal of water quality engineering is to ensure water safety to humans and the environment. Traditional water quality engineering consists of monitoring, evaluation, and control of key water quality parameters. This approach provides some vital insights into water quality, however, most of these parameters do not account for pollutant mixtures - a reality that terminal water users face, nor do most of these parameters have a direct connection with the human health safety of waters. This puts the real health-specific effects of targeted water pollutant monitoring and engineering control in question. To focus our attention to one of the original goals of water quality engineering - human health and environmental protection, we advocate here the toxicity-oriented water quality monitoring and control. This article presents some of our efforts towards such goal. Specifically, complementary to traditional water quality parameters, we evaluated the water toxicity using high sensitivity toxicological endpoints, and subsequently investigated the performance of some of the water treatment strategies in modulating the water toxicity. Moreover, we implemented the toxicity concept into existing water treatment design theory to facilitate toxicity-oriented water quality control designs. Suggestions for the next steps are also discussed. We hope our work will intrigue water quality scientists and engineers to improve and embrace the mixture water pollutant and toxicological evaluation and engineering control.
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Acknowledgements
SD would like to acknowledge the support from “the Fundamental Research Funds for the Central Universities.” from the Ministry of Education, China. XC would like to thank the support from the National Natural Science Foundation of China (Grant No. U1911204).
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Dr. Shengkun Dong received his Ph.D. degree in Environmental Engineering from the University of Illinois at Urbana Champaign (USA) in 2016. He is currently an Associate Professor at Sun Yat-sen University (China) with a research focus on water safety.
Mr. Chenyue Yin began his studies at Hebei GEO University (China), where he obtained his bachelor’s degree in Hydrology in 2018. Following this, he started his post-graduate study, supervised by Dr. Shengkun Dong at Sun Yat-sen University in 2019. His research interests focus on toxicity of water.
Dr. Xiaohong Chen received his Ph.D. degree in Hydrology and Water Resources from Wuhan University (China). His research interests are water resource allocation and water quality safety.
Highlights
• Toxicity-oriented water quality monitoring was proposed.
• Toxicity-oriented water quality engineering control was proposed.
• Future issues of the proposition were discussed.
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Dong, S., Yin, C. & Chen, X. Toxicity-oriented water quality engineering. Front. Environ. Sci. Eng. 14, 80 (2020). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11783-020-1259-4
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11783-020-1259-4