Problems in Supercritical Water Oxidation Process and Proposed Solutions

Supercritical water oxidation (SCWO) is a promising green technology to completely convert hazardous wastewaters to innocuous products, allowing energy recovery. This process has been extensively applied to many model compounds and real wastewaters at laboratory scale. However SCWO treatments at the pilot plant scale of real wastewaters are much less extensive in literature. Furthermore, the application of this technology to industrial wastewaters has the two main drawbacks of corrosion and salt deposition, and some other problems to be solved related to management of biphasic wastes, presence of suspended solids, high costs, etc., so currently the industrial scale-up and commercialization of the process is still subject to difficulties. This work reviews the main technical solutions studied by numerous authors to avoid the drawbacks mentioned. Besides, since the economic feasibility of the process will depend on the energy recovery of the reactor effluent, this aspect is also presented in this review.