Abstract ▼ AI-Helper

In 2015, the water purifiers market has reached a size of approximately two trillion won and entered the maturity stage with the penetration rate of over 50%. The number of new entrants, however, continues to rise. The concerned legislations have no mandatory requirements for filter material testing...

In 2015, the water purifiers market has reached a size of approximately two trillion won and entered the maturity stage with the penetration rate of over 50%. The number of new entrants, however, continues to rise. The concerned legislations have no mandatory requirements for filter material testing, which means there is no institutional device to check the quality of activated carbon filters used in water purifiers for household purposes. It is thus true that water purifiers lack in adsorptive power today. The survey results show that tap water supplied through water treatment goes through changes to water quality in the distribution process. As for turbidity and residual chlorine, which are water quality indicators that can be analyzed any time, turbidity gradually increases in the water supply process, whereas residual chlorine gradually decreases. Trihalomethane also tends to increase with distance, which is attributed to its reactions to humic or organic matter-related factors. In an effort to examine the absorptive performance of water purifiers and adjust them to reality at a time when various types of secondary contamination happened in the old water supply pipes with the penetration rate of water purifiers exceeding 50%, this study set out to conduct an absorptive power experiment with water purifier filters manufactured, sold, and distributed in the domestic market on four analysis items in the "criteria, specifications, and indication standards of water treatment agents, namely phenol value, ABS value, methylene blue bleaching, iodine absorptive power to check their performance. The study compared the activated carbon filters for water purifiers in the non-compliance rate of absorptive power between 2008 and 2014 based on the experiment results even though the population was small and could not represent all activated carbon filters. The comparison results show that the four analysis items dropped below 10% in the non-compliance rate except for ABS value with phenol value dropping from 59% to 3.9%, ABS value from 86% to 20.8%, methylene blue bleaching from 45% to 2.6%, and iodine absorptive power from 8.9% to 1.3%. The findings indicate that the absorptive power improved thanks to the technological development and quality control of manufacturers, but ABS value was still high in the non-compliance rate at 20.8%. If the standard specifications of activated carbon in water treatment agents are changed to "under 25 for phenol value, under 50 for ABS value, over 150 mL/g for methylene blue bleaching, and over 950 mg/g for iodine absorptive power" with mandatory material testing, consumers will be able to use a water purifier with higher safety. According to the announcement on water treatment agents, there is no need to grind a sample for testing when preparing a sample to analyze the absorptive power items of activated carbon as long as it is powdered activated carbon. When it comes to granular activated carbon, however, it is required to accurately measure certain amounts of sample that has passed through the 200 sieve(75 ㎛) after grinding. The problem is that the particle size distribution of sample that has passed through the sieve varies according to the grinding method and duration, which is why different testing agencies produce different test results even with the same activated carbon used in experiments. As a result, civil complaints and disputes often occur between a manufacturer that commissions a test with its samples and a testing agency that performs testing. The present study thus ground granular activated carbon and categorized it according to particle size. The particle size scopes were A〈45, 45≤B〈53, 53≤D<63, and 63