Abstract
Corrosion of copper pipes may release high amounts of copper into the water, exceeding the maximum concentration of copper for drinking water standards. Typically, the events with the highest release of copper into drinking water are related to the presence of biofilms. This article reviews this phenomenon, focusing on copper ingestion and its health impacts, the physicochemical mechanisms and the microbial involvement on copper release, the techniques used to describe and understand this phenomenon, and the hydrodynamic effects. A conceptual model is proposed and the mathematical models are reviewed.
Highlights
The lack of fresh and safe water will be one of the main problems worldwide in the decades.Public health and the development of accurate analytic techniques have strengthened water quality standards, and new environmental issues have appeared
0.45 or500.2 μm, it is wellwe documented nanoparticles reach diameters ofare around nm have foundthat no copper evidence nanoparticles can reach diameters of around nm we have found no supporting formation of copper nanoparticles during corrosion events outside the laboratory,evidence a cautious supporting formation of copper nanoparticles a interpretation should assume that these particlesduring may becorrosion occurringevents in the outside system, the andlaboratory, their presence cautious interpretation should assume that these particles may be occurring in the system, and their could lead to misinterpretation of the solid phase controlling the presence could lead to misinterpretation of the solid phase solubility of a given system (Figure 4)
We developed a conceptual model of copper corrosion using a mechanistic approach that divides the phenomenon into several processes that occur on different spatial and temporal scales [2,4,63,68,114,150,151]
Summary
The lack of fresh and safe water will be one of the main problems worldwide in the decades. Copper pipes consist only of one chemical element while other scale forming materials (e.g., brass and bronze) are made of several elements This variability in the composition, and material characteristics alloys, does not facilitate the design of experiments and the understanding of leaching processes. The corrosion of copper pipes presents two fundamental problems: structural damage and human health risk from the release of copper-rich corrosion by-products (in dissolved or particulate form) into the drinking water. Traditional studies of copper release in plumbing systems assume that the water extracted from a pipe follows a plug-type flow, and that the pipe surface does not interact with the bulk water under flow conditions This approach underestimates the total mass of copper released from a pipe in a drinking water system [15]. This review presents a new conceptualization of copper release in drinking water systems, including time-dependence, biofilm and hydrodynamic effects
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