Electro-oxidation process performance in treatment of the effluent from a raisin cleaning factory in Malayer city

Production and processing of raisin different areas are different based on weather conditions and their technological devices. Thus, generated wastewaters in each area are very different from another one in terms of quality and quantity. The objective of this study was to investigate the efficiency of the electrochemical process, which is an environmentally benign and simple technique, in the effluent of a raisin cleaning factory.
The wastewater from a raisin cleaning factory was treated by the electro-oxidation process in pilot-scale reactor (as batch) with an effective liquid volume of 80 ml. In order to study the amount of the performance of this process in organic matters removal, chemical oxygen demand (COD) of the samples were measured before and after every run. Moreover, the effects of parameters pH, current density, and reaction time were studied and consumed electrical power was calculated.
It was found that 86% of COD was removed at the following conditions: pH 3, current density 40 mA/cm2 and reaction time 360 min and the efficiency went up with increasing both time and current density. Further, at optimum conditions, the amount of electrical energy consumption was 5.4 kW/h COD.
Considering high loading rate of the wastewater in this study, this system can be applied as a pretreatment step despite having high efficiency and the effluent from this process requires further treatment to meet environmental standards.