Of the water treatment plants(WTPs) in the United States, approximately 31% use bulk hypochlorite solutions for disinfection and 63% use chlorine gas. Additionally, 8% of US WTPs use on-site generators(OSGs) for electrolytical sodium hypochlorite production from brine solutions(Snyder et al., 2009). The majority of utilities operated by K-water, Korea use chlorine gas, approximately 16% of all K-water treatment plants use bulk hypochlorite for disinfection, and approximately 24% use on-site hypochlorite generators.
Hypochlorite solutions contain a lot of unregulated contaminants, including bromate, chlorite, chlorate, and perchlorate(Stanford et al., 2011). Chlorate is a contaminant produced from on-site generation of hypochlorite solutions and the subsequent decomposition of hypochlorite(Snyder et al., 2009). Bromate is another possible contaminant of hypochlorite solutions and results from the oxidation of bromide to hypobromite to bromate via mechanism analogous to that of chlorate(Stanford et al., 2011). In the year of 2011, bromate, chlorate and perchlorate have been included on the Contaminant Candidate List, Ministry of Environment, Korea. And those three parameters are expected to be included in the drinking water regulation. The guideline MCL for bromate, chlorate and perchlorate in drinking water, Korea were 0.010 mg/L, 0.7 mg/L and 0.015 mg/L, respectively. Bromate concentration ranged from none detect to 0.009 mg/L and chlorate concentration ranging from none detect to 0.6 mg/L in the finished water treated with hypochlorite solutions in the 22 utilities operating K-water between the year 2007 to 2011. However, perchlorate was not detected in the 22 utilities operating K-water.
This study was done to find out optimum operating factors like a storage temperature for on-site sodium hypochlorite generator. The results from this study provide the basic information for hypochlorite solution operating scenarios.