Basic handling of UV spectra for urban water quality monitoring

Abstract

Recent environmental regulations imply the need for optimisation of wastewater treatment and, therefore, a need for tools providing quantitative and qualitative information about urban wastewater characterisation and evolution. This work presents simple methods developed for UV spectra exploitation, namely direct comparison, spectra differences and normalisation. Simple comparisons of spectra helped understand the UV physical response of total suspended solids and enabled to check wastewater quality conservation. The investigation of the various size range fractions of samples from different origins enables the proposal of a typology of these fractions taking into account organic matter origin, its stability, the part of inorganic particles and weather conditions.