Eawag, the Swiss Federal Institute of Aquatic Science and Technology, is an internationally active research institute within the domain of the ETH (Swiss Federal Institute of Science and Technology). It is committed to the ecologically, economically and socially responsible management of water.
Within the department of Water Resources and Drinking Water, the group Molecular Envi-ronmental Geochemistry has a vacancy for a PhD Student in Environmental Geochemistry.
The subject of the doctoral thesis will be “Iron(III) precipitates formed by iron(II) oxida-tion in natural waters: Structure, reactivity and impact on arsenic”.
Iron precipitation plays an important biogeochemical role and influences water quality in many natural systems. Iron precipitation is also widely used for the treatment of wastewater and the purification of drinking water, for example to remove arsenic.
The goal of this project is to advance the current state of knowledge regarding the structure and reactivity of iron precipitates forming under a variety of chemical conditions as a basis for improved water resources management. Arsenic represents a widespread contaminant of water resources and its co-transformation with iron will therefore be considered in this study. The work is predominantly laboratory-based and involves the use of state-of-the-art analytical instrumentation. Synchrotron-based X-ray techniques and electron microscopy will mainly be used for the characterization of iron precipitates and arsenic speciation.
