Addressing the issue of industrial wastewater cleaning is one of the huge challenges for the industries. The concerning utilities are still struggling to replace and upgrade the aging and inefficient distribution networks that treat this wastewater. In addition to this, the insufficient public and private financing for the infrastructure developments have been hampering for a very long time now. In fact, once the allotment for funds could still be made what poses a major challenge is- absence of a creative and smart solution in order to save more funds for the same. This becomes specially tricky when there persists a high level of contamination into the waterbodies as a result of draining wastewater into them.
To overcome this issue a group of engineers may soon come up with a smart solution in cleaning hugely contaminated industrial wastewater streams. New technologies are coming into role like the ICT and IoT that are constantly being integrated into the traditional water management system to make it more efficient and smarter. Researchers from the School of Chemical and Biomolecular Engineering have designed an electrochemical oxidation process with the objective to clean up complex wastewater that contained a toxic cocktail of chemical pollutants.
This research comprised severely polluted industrial wastewater having a combination of organic and inorganic species for the duration of a biofuel production process. This wastewater was further composed of nitrogen, carbon, and phosphorus, as apart of research in the pilot plant. As far as the electrochemical process for treating this hugely contaminated wastewater is concerned, it involved wastewater purification with the help of electricity that is by using specialized electrodes. Researchers first released electricity, then ran oxidation reactions close to the surfaces of electrode, that transformed the organic pollutants into harmless gasses, minerals, or ions.
This process is apt for industries wineries, paper and pulp processing, as well as the pharmacy production sites as these are bound to comply with the stringent regulations for wastewater disposal. The team of researchers is soon to carry out research focused on specialized pollutants to better comprehend the chemical alterations taking place in the phases of electrochemical oxidation and will upscale the process.
