Treatment and Operating Cost Analysis of Textile Wastewater by Electrocoagulation

Abstract

Textile dyeing industries are utilizing large quantity of raw water for the processing at dyeing and finishing units. At the same time, there generate huge amount of wastewater from different processes in the textile industry. Many of textile industries in India are using variety of synthetic dyes for the processing purpose. These dyes are very complex in nature. Many dyes contain organic compounds with functional groups, carboxylic (–COOH), amine (–NH2) and azo (–N=N–). Wastewater generating from textile industry is also found to be in variety of colours along with very high COD and BOD values. Present study deals with the treatment of textile dyeing effluent with aluminium electrodes in electrochemical reactor. Experiments were carried out at different pH range (4-10) and current density 53 mA/cm2. Maximum COD and Colour removal was found 95 % and 92 % respectively at optimum pH at the cost of 13.3 Wh/dm3. Electro-coagulation was found suitable for the treatment of textile dyeing effluent.