BIOLOGICAL AND PHYSICAL-CHEMICAL METHODS FOR TREATMENT OF SEMICONDUCTOR MANUFACTURING EFFLUENTS

Abstract

Semiconductor manufacturing is one of the most advancing, growing and evolving industries. The production of semiconductors presents several challenges, both technologically and environmentally. The amount and complexity of the chemical substances utilized in the manufacturing process has been growing exponentially, and new chemicals are often introduced to the process and the environment. Two steps of this process play a special important role in the introduction of new chemical and demand of natural resources: Chemical Mechanical Planarization (CMP) and Photolithography.Wastewaters from the semiconductor manufacturing are complex and have several chemicals in different concentrations. Heavy metals, acids, chelators, surfactants and other chemicals are found in semiconductor effluents. Part of the scope of this study is to evaluate and remediate wastewaters produced in semiconductor manufacturing.During the development of this project it was found that copper can be successfully removed and recovered from CMP wastewaters by the use of a sulfate reducing bioreactor and a crystallization reactor, promoting precipitation of copper sulfides on the surface of silica sand. High removal and recovery efficiencies were found as result of the study. Another finding include that citrate is a readily biodegradable compound which can be successfully utilized as electron donor for anaerobic processes such as methanogenesis and sulfate reductions. However other important chelator, like EDTA, can cause toxicity to these microorganisms and affect important biological processes. PFOS is an important chemical for the semiconductor industry; however, the physical and chemical properties make this compound persistent in the environment and bioaccumulative. New substitutes for PFOS were tested and evaluated for their environmental impact. It was found that perfluorination plays an important role in the chemical properties of PFOS and removal of this characteristic improves the environmental performance of the new substitutes. Evaluation of these new chemicals was also performed by simulation and modeling. The software utilized in this study identified properties like toxicity and octanol-water partition coefficient accurately. On the other hand biodegradability was poorly estimated and new models are suggested for evaluation of this property for compounds with characteristics similar to the ones studied here (specifically high fluorination).