Operational Cost Analysis for the Treatment of Various Textile Effluents by Electrochemical Process Using Stainless Steel and Aluminum Electrodes

The development of treatment processes from laboratory scale to industries involves a lot of troubles due to the automation of process parameters and fluctuated characteristics of wastewater. In the present study, six different real-time textile effluents of samples such as S1 to S6 are characterized and treated by electrocoagulation process using Stainless Steel (SS) and Aluminum (Al) electrodes. The maximum removal efficiencies of color as 94%, turbidity as 99%, Chemical Oxygen Demand (COD) as 84% and Biological Oxygen Demand (BOD) as 82% is obtained for effluent sample S1 with fixed operational conditions such as the applied voltage of 4V, inter-electrode distance of 3 cm, the surface area of the electrode of 25 cm2 and agitation speed of 500 rpm respectively. After the electrocoagulation process, the BOD5/COD ratio of all effluent samples is observed as biodegradable limits. Under the fixed conditions, the operational cost for the treatment of effluent sample S1 analyzed as 2.42 and 1.01 $/m3 by using SS and Al electrodes respectively.