Electrochemical reactor with carbon membrane electrodes for efficient phenol removal via anode and cathode synergism

Current electrochemical membrane reactors (EMRs) focus on half-cell reactions, which limits their efficiency. Herein, an EMR-P with full-cell reactions was constructed using a carbon membrane (CM) as the cathode and a TiO₂-loaded CM as the anode. Noteworthy, this proposed innovative design has no ion-exchange membrane and consists of two permeates for anodic electrocatalytic and cathodic electro-Fenton processes. Results showed that the removal rates of phenol and COD by EMR-P were 99.2% and 93.9%, respectively, with energy consumption of 0.43 kWh kg COD^–1, which were superior to those of other EMRs. Such superior performance of EMR-P was attributed to the synergism of electro-Fenton and electrocatalytic oxidation, as well as the high adsorption property of CM, which promoted \({1\atop}{\rm{O}}_{2}\) generation and COD removal. Additionally, the cathode made more contribution to the COD removal (59.0%) than the anode (41.0%). Overall, this work provides several insights into the design of EMRs for cleaning industrial wastewater.