Electrocoagulation of Textile Wastewater with Fe Sacrificial Anode

Abstract

Electrocoagulation is an electrochemical technique used to treat a high pollutedeffluent whereby sacrificial anodes corrode to release active coagulant precursors intothe solution. This research focuses on the performance of EC technique to treat a highstrength wastewater textile industry located in Al-Hilla-Iraq using a batchwise mode.Several working parameters such as current density, total suspension solid removalpercent, chemical oxygen demand removal percent, turbidity removal percent and theoperating time were studied. It was found that the application of 12mA/cm provided69.2%, 62.5% and 54.3% removal in turbidity, COD and TSS, respectively, while theapplication of 20mA/cm2 current density provided 90.1%, 85.2% and 83.1% removalin turbidity, COD and TSS, respectively, within 60 min. of EC treatment and with aninter-electrode spacing of 5cm. Also it was found that the contaminants of treatedtextile wastewater such as BOD, COD, TDS, TSS, turbidity, nitrates, chloride, totalhardness, sulfate, total phosphates, electrical conductivity, oil and grease and the totalphenols were within allowable limits for wastewater reuse. The loss of particles due toelectrocoagulation after treatment as a function of operation time was expressed as afirst order kinetic model and the kinetic constant for each contaminant removal waspredicted for each current density. 2