Water Remediation and its Activation by Atmospheric Non-Equilibrium Plasma Treatment

As part of the lecture series “Current State and Perspectives of Natural Resources of Serbia in the Era of Climate Change, Energy Transition and New Directions of Economic Development“,  Nevena Puač, PhD, will give the lecture titled ‘Water Remediation and its Activation by Atmospheric Non-Equilibrium Plasma Treatment’, on Thursday, 17 April, at noon, at the SASA Grand Hall.

Clean water is essential for the ecosystem, supporting life and facilitating social and economic development. However, with the growing population, human activities increasingly impact the environment. Presently, wastewater produced by industry, agriculture, households, and other sources contains significant amounts of organic micropollutants (OMPs), leading to various environmental and health issues. Research indicates that numerous OMPs, including pharmaceuticals, pesticides, and organic dyes, are commonly found in wastewater, surface water, and even drinking water. As a consequence, aquatic life and public health are endangered.

In this lecture we will try to give an overview of applications of plasma systems used in degradation of OMPs, their main characteristics, efficiency in degradation of OMPs, energy consumption and main challenges related to scaling up of these systems.

Dr. Nevena Puač is a principal research fellow at the Institute of Physics Belgrade working in the low temperature plasma physics field – low and atmospheric pressure plasmas, expert in numerous diagnostics methods and application of plasmas in biology, medicine, agriculture and water remediation. She obtained her PhD in 2007 at the Faculty of Physics, University of Belgrade with a part of the thesis completed at the Instituto Superior Tecnico, Lisbon, Portugal. She was a PI of national technological project (TD 23016, Ministry of Education, Science and Technological Development, 2008-2010), multidisciplinary project (III41011, Ministry of Education, Science and Technological Development, 2011-2019), Science Fund of Republic of Serbia project APPerTAin-BIOM (7739780, 2022-2025) and PI at several bilateral projects. She was the Action Chair and coordinator of the multidisciplinary COST Action, PlAgri-CA19110, “Plasma Agriculture for smart and sustainable agriculture” and was a leader of Marie Sklodowska Curie ITN project (Nowelties 812880) at the Institute of Physics. She has published more than 70 articles in international journals and publications. Her h-index is 26 with more than 1900 citations (Web of Science). Most of the highly cited papers that she has published are in the field of applications of plasma in biology and medicine. Until now she has supervised several PhD and Master and Diploma theses. She was co-chair and organizer of several conferences and workshops, editor and guest editor in several international journals and a member of scientific committees at international conferences.