As a result, persulfate solutions may contain several different oxidant and radical species.
One
consequence of this mixture of oxidizing
species is that multiple pathways for contaminant oxidation
may exist, increasing the probability of reducing the target compound concentrations. However, such
diversity of oxidant species makes the assessment of the “stoichiometric” amount of persulfate n
eeded
to destroy a given concentration of contaminant problematic, and thus it is common practice to revert
back to the basic, two electron transfer associated with the persulfate anion (
seen in
first equation
above
)
to determine
the s
toichiometric persulf
ate demand.