Treatment of Brewery Wastewater by Electrocoagulation

Abstract

Electrocoagulation has been known for more than a century for the treatment of contaminated waters. This process has been applied to treat various kinds of industrial wastewaters, domestic wastewaters, sewage and ground water. The aim of this study is to investigate the treatment of the brewery wastewater using electrocoagulation and to examine the effect of operational parameters of electrocoagulation such as electrode material, inter electrode distance and initial wastewater temperature on the removal of Chemical Oxygen Demand (COD), Total Suspended Solids (TSS), Turbidity, Conductivity and pH. Three electrode materials i.e. aluminium, iron and stainless steel have been used as anodes and cathodes in different combinations and are connected in mono polar parallel mode. To check the effect of electrode spacing, three distances have been selected 0.5 cm, 1 cm and 1.5 cm. To check the effect of temperature, 20 ˚C, 30 ˚C and 40 ˚C were chosen as variable temperature. A total number of 81 electrocoagulation experimental runs were performed using 8 electrodes. Removal of selected parameters were checked after 15 minutes and 30 minutes of treatment times. The results showed that the maximum removal of contaminants were achieved using aluminium as anode and cathode. The optimum temperature value was found to be 30 ˚C. At this temperature, maximum removal of COD, TSS and turbidity were found. The optimum value for electrode spacing was 0.5 cm. The maximum COD, turbidity and TSS removals were found to be around 81.5 % with aluminium as anode and cathode, 85.8 % with aluminium as anode and iron as cathode and 89.6 % with aluminium anode and stainless steel as cathode at the temperature of 30 ˚C and with electrode spacing of 0.5 cm. The results showed that electrocoagulation is an effective process for treating brewery wastewater.