Removal of COD by electrocoagulation at optimized conditions

Abstract

Coal gasification is considered as one of the prominent technologies which helps to reduce energy problems caused by decrease in supplies of natural gas and petroleum. But, waste water that is generated coal gasification contains huge amounts of phenols, cresols, ammonia and other organic compounds. Electrocoagulation technology was used successfully to pre-treat the effluent coal gasifier as an electrolyte for the removal of polluting factors as a result of coagulation and precipitation of suspended solids followed by sedimentation under gravity. COD determines the amount of organic pollutants found in the water making it a useful measure of water quality. The environmental significance of COD is very high. Coagulation process is one of the best ways to treat wastewater and industrial effluents like coal gasifier and can be considered as an efficient treatment method to reduce COD of the effluent. The study and experiments of the project mainly involves treatment of the coal gasifier effluent. The parameters such as pH, Electrolysis time (ET), Voltage are used in order to explore the changes it can account for the removal of COD. The optimum values of pH, Electrolysis time (ET), Voltage are determined as 7.0, 90 min., 10V respectively. These optimum values are finally used to treat the coal gasifier effluent. Analysis of COD is done to find the amount of COD present in the final sample using a standard method.