Kinetic modeling of lag times during photo-induced disinfection of E. coli in sunlit surface waters: Unraveling the pathways of exogenous inactivation.

The present work presents a kinetic analysis of the exogenous photo-induced disinfection of E. coli in natural waters. Herein, the inactivation of bacteria by light and photo-generated transient species, i.e., hydroxyl radical (HO·), excited triplet states of organic matter (3CDOM*) and singlet oxygen (1O2), was studied. It was found that the exogenous disinfection of E. coli proceeds through a lag time, followed by an exponential phase triggered by photo-generated HO·, 1O2 and 3CDOM*. Also, we report that the concentration increase of transient species (and especially HO·) precursors decreased the lag times of bacteria inactivation. Due to the limitations of the competition kinetics methodology to include the lag phase, an alternative strategy to study the interaction between E. coli and photo-generated transient species was proposed, considering the log-linear pseudo-first order rate constants and lag-times. On this basis and by using APEX software, a full kinetic analysis of exogenous bacterial inactivation, taking into account both lag-time and exponential decay, was developed. This approach provided insights into the conditions that could make exogenous inactivation competitive with the endogenous process for the E. coli inactivation in natural sunlit waters. Hence, this research contributes to the understanding of fundamental kinetic aspects of photoinduced bacterial inactivation, which is the basis for light-assisted processes such as the solar disinfection (SODIS).