Treatment of Paper Industry Wastewater by Electrocoagulation

This work presents removal of COD from Paper wastewater by Electrocoagulation (EC) process using Iron 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, electrolysis time and initial pH are studied to achieve higher removal. The performance of EC process was carried out in batch reactor. In this process, samples are taken out from the batch reactor at regular interval of 20 minutes. Results obtained show that the most effective removal efficiency is achieved at 1 A of applied current at 16V.Moreover, the experimental results also show that the COD removal was strongly influenced by the initial pH. EC is found to be very efficient at pH 9. The highest COD removal efficiency of 93.5% occurred at 16V at electrolysis time of 80 min. In this study, the EC process was proved effective and is capable in removing COD, TDS, TSS and phosphate efficiently.