Treatment of basic dyes with electrocoagulation method

One of the major challenges facing mankind today is to provide clean water to a vast majority of the population around the world. The amount of wastewaters with different characterizations and high flow rate has increased based on increasing population and developing technology at any moment. The physico-chemical treatment processes commonly used in the clarification of textile industry wastewaters are filtration, flotation, ion-exchange, chemical precipitation, chemical oxidation, adsorption, reverse osmosis, and electrodialysis. Innovative, cheap and effective methods of purifying water of human consumption as well as to clean the wastewater from industrial effluents before discharging into any other water systems are needed. Electrocoagulation (EC) is an electrochemical wastewater treatment technology that is currently experiencing both increased popularity and considerable technical improvements.In this study, EC has been used for the removal of color from solutions containing C. I. Basic Blue 17 (BB17) used in the textile industry. This dye is used in the wool and blanket factories for fiber dyeing. In the EC of BB17 the effects of initial pH, electrolysis time, initial dye concentration, current density were examined in the presence of NaCl as electrolyte and energy consumptions were calculated. The dye in the aqueous solution was effectively removed when iron was used as sacrificial anode. It was found that >95% of the dye was removed from the solution under the optimum conditions such as; current density 8,738 mA/cm2, operating time 7 min and initial pH 4-8. The corresponding electrode and energy consumptions during the electrolysis were found to be 1.688 kg Fe/kg dye and 32.74 kWh/kg dye, respectively.