Performance evaluation of bench-scale electrocoagulation for treatment of bio-treated distillery wastewater

• Main Author: Den, Chompey
• Format: text
• Language: English
• Published: Animo Repository 2016
• Online Access: https://animorepository.dlsu.edu.ph/etd_masteral/5219
• Institution: De La Salle University

Bio-treated distillery wastewater (BTDW) has found to have a good application as fertilizer and irrigation to increase the yield of agriculture production because it contains high nutrients such as nitrates and phosphates. Apart from this, BTDW is known to contain significant amounts of organics resulting to high BOD/COD which will require treatment before its disposal to receiving bodies of water or land resources. Due to this, post-treatment techniques are required to remove the BOD, COD, TSS and nutrients from the wastewater. The applicability of Electrocoagulation (EC) technology as post treatment for BTDW using an 18 L up flow semi-batch reactor with Al/Al electrode pair was investigated. BTDW obtained from anaerobic and aerobic process were used as samples. The effects of operational parameters such as current density, flow rate and pH on the removal of pollutants (nitrate, phosphate, TSS, COD, and color) were evaluated. At the optimum condition of pH at 3, current density at 36 A/m2, Flow rate at 1L/min and 90 min of electrolysis time, the percentage of NO3, PO4, COD, TSS, ammonia and color removal were 30 %, 71 %, 58 %, 22 %, 14 % and 27 %, respectively.