Electrocoagulation of textile wastewater with Fe sacrificial anode

Abstract EN

Electrocoagulation is an electrochemical technique used to treat a high polluted effluent whereby sacrificial anodes corrode to release active coagulant precursors into the solution.

This research focuses on the performance of EC technique to treat a high strength wastewater textile industry located in Al-Hilla-Iraq using a batch wise mode.

Several working parameters such as current density, total suspension solid removal percent, chemical oxygen demand removal percent, turbidity removal percent and the operating time were studied.

It was found that the application of 12mA / cm2 provided 69.2 %, 62.5 % and 54.3 % removal in turbidity, COD and TSS, respectively, while the application of 20mA / cm2 current density provided 90.1 %, 85.2 % and 83.1% removal in turbidity, COD and TSS, respectively, within 60 min.

of EC treatment and with an inter-electrode spacing of 5cm.

Also it was found that the contaminants of treated textile wastewater such as BOD, COD, TDS, TSS, turbidity, nitrates, chloride, total hardness, sulfate, total phosphates, electrical conductivity, oil and grease and the total phenols were within allowable limits for wastewater reuse.

The loss of particles due to electrocoagulation after treatment as a function of operation time was expressed as a first order kinetic model and the kinetic constant for each contaminant removal was predicted for each current density.