The power of electrocoagulation (EC)

Efficient and selective removal of various substances

Nowadays around the world most of water bodies are nearly heavily polluted. Among the water pollution ammonia contamination is a fundamental, problem for the environment. But the recovery of compounds or elementary raw materials like phosphorous is important, since this element is not available indefinitely. The EC is doing important work here, that no other technology can perform as effectively.
Most processes for nitrogen removal from wastewater are biological and sometimes quite complex. While these processes are energy-efficient, they cannot cope well with irregular, strong inflow fluctuations, as they often occur. Longer phases without inflow can even lead to a complete breakdown of the biological reactor performance. Further disadvantages of biological methods, is the metabolic activity of microbes which is a must, to do fermentation and degradation of drugs, which is known as a limitation (micro-pollution) in municipal wastewater. It needs further treatment with ozone and activated carbon as an additional step which is quite expensive.
A better alternative to the biological process is electrolysis / electrocoagulation, which was experimented already some time ago for wastewater treatment, for example for ammonium removal and COD reduction.
As is often the case in this technology, the electrodes are crucial for the success of the method and its economic viability, as not many electrode materials are suitable for the degradation of ammonium. Chloride-containing waters are treated with chlorine-producing electrodes, known as kinetic point chlorination, where chloride is converted to hypochlorous acid, which reacts with ammonium to form chloramines and further to molecular nitrogen, which can escape in gaseous form.
As ammonia could be completely removed by simultaneous oxidation and reduction in combination in one reactor with aluminium alloy (Celdar®) and Ti/RuO2. This method is by far better than any other biological method with nasty and expensive biomass-handling.
Next advantage to remove selectively phosphorous often as phosphate in solution is the choice to use magnesium electrodes, where Mg(NH4)PO4 - known as MAP-method, as precipitation is won.
Another advantage is the removal micro-plastic by use of EC preferable with Al-alloy electrodes. Furthermore, to inactivate micro-organisms most completely (99.9%) because one can use this method in house, near food production, where no other method is available to clean waste water. The danger of reinfection is not accepted by HACCP method in case of biological methods. Also, a low area for EC-installations is remarkable.
EC is further known with proof of concept to reduce COD to the same time in parallel with reduction of anions / cations in water, which is leading to a significant reduction of conductivity - means salt loading. The different choice of electrodes permits to reduce nearly selectively any ions in solution in a waste-water phase. This is also important to reduce hardness (up to 90%) of water to be able to perform a membrane filtration for tape-water recovery. EC is the only technology who could handle at low-cost brine solution / retentate from reverse osmosis (RO) to recover water.
Never the less EC needs no chemicals (just pH adjusting) and low power consumption approximately 1.5 to 2.0 kWh/m³ water depending on electrode distance and conductivity of the water.
EC could be integrated in every installation (also biological treatment plant) of wastewater clearance. EC is a real time method which works well also for big mass flow (m³/h) and sacrificial electrodes could be replaced by continuous feed of metal powder combined with magnetic carrier dsa-electrodes. This new method filed for patent application recently, is a big step ahead to avoid electrode changes after consumption.

Bioway Consulting Ltd
Norbert Pautz, Managing Director
C./ Tirant Lo Blanc 4,3 - ES-03750 Pedreguer / Alicante
Spain
www.biowayconsulting.com
contact@biowayconsulting.com
phone: 0034965030786

Bioway Consulting Ltd is the successor of Bioway GmbH / Switzerland - an engineering company busy in waste-water treatment by electrolysis / electrocoagulation and cleaning of air by inactivation of "Corona & Co,, microbes and VOCs by short wave infrared radiation

This release was published on openPR.