Performance evaluation of electrocoagulation technique for removing groundwater hardness of Tikrit University

الملخص EN

The performance of Electrocoagulation (EC) process for removal of hardness in groundwater (GW) of Tikrit University in Salahaddin province, north of Baghdad in Iraq has been studied using aluminum (Al) electrodes with both bipolar and monopolar configurations.

The effect of initial pH, applied voltage (U), electrolysis time (t), and electrodes configurations on the performance of EC has been investigated.

It was found that the best initial pHvalue to remove hardness (HD) was 9.5.

The results indicated that increasing U and t had a positive effect on the hardness removal efficiency (% Ehardness) to reach 90.4 % and it was influenced by the electrodes configuration in which % Ehardness was 83.5 % in bipolar connection compared with 66.2 % in monopolar connection.

Also The electrical energy consumption % Ehardness and the experimentally and theoreticallyelectrodes consumption (Wexp) and (Wthe) were calculated.

It was absorbed, as determined, that there is no significant difference between pseudo-first and second-order kinetic model except at 40 volt that the pseudo second-order kinetic model fits better than the first-order kinetic model with the data of the electrocoagulation process.

Finally the cost at themost favorable conditions for EC process was calculatedresulting that the electrocoagulation process is successfully applied to remove the hardness rate from groundwater with high performance.