Treatment of Pharmaceutical Wastewater by Electrocoagulation Process

This paper presents the results of research in removal of TKN, COD, color, TDS, TSS, from pharmaceutical wastewater by electrocoagulation (EC) process using aluminum as a sacrificial electrode which is currently used for the purification of many types of water and wastewater. The effecting parameters such as applied voltage, conductivity and initial pH were studied to achieve higher removal. The performance of EC process was carried out in batch reactor. In this process, samples of 25mL were taken out from the batch at 30, 60, 90 and 120 minutes of contact time. Results obtained show that the most effective removal efficiency could be achieved at 1 A of applied current. Moreover, the experimental results also show that the COD removal was strongly influenced by the initial pH. EC was found to be very efficient when the range of initial pH is between 4 and 8. The highest COD removal efficiency of 82% occurred at a current of 1A, initial pH of 4 and contact time of 120 min. In this study, the EC process was proved effective and was capable in degrading COD, TKN, Color, TDS, TSS from pharmaceutical wastewater.