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Abstract

The global spread of over 14,000 per- and poly-fluoroalkyl substances (PFAS) has raised environmental concerns, triggering substantial efforts in developing PFAS treatment technologies. This study focuses on the applications of boron-doped diamond-electrochemical processes for remediation of PFAS-contaminated waters. Perfluorooctanoic acid (PFOA) and its common alternatives, including perfluorobutanoic acid (PFBA), hexafluoropropylene oxide dimer acid (HFPO-DA/GenX), and 6:2 fluorotelomer carboxylic acid (6:2 FTCA) were selected as representative of legacy, emerging, and precursor PFAS. This research offers valuable insights into the impact of key operational and solution parameters on the efficiency of electrochemical systems. Subsequently, the degradability, fluorine recovery, transformation pathway, and contributions from electro-synthesized radicals for the studied PFAS were investigated. The results indicated the significance of chain length and structure, with slower decay rate (min-1) obtained for shorter chains: PFBA (0.008)