Impact of a Sand Filtration Pre-Treatment Step on High Loaded Grey Water Treatment by an Electrocoagulation Technique

01.Jan.2022

​The application of electrocoagulation (EC) technique for grey water (GW) treatment has witnessed a dramatic increase in the last few years. However, treatment of GW by EC technique alone might not meet the required standards in terms of pollutants removal, specifically when grey water contains high loaded of pollutants. To enhance the EC efficiency for GW treatment, a sand filtration (SF) unit was integrated with EC technique. This preliminary study was conducted for the removal of turbidity, colour and chemical oxygen demand (COD) to explore the impact of integrating a SF unit as a pre-treatment step to EC technology for treating high loaded GW. Three different voltage gradients were investigated (5 V/cm, 10 V/cm, and 15 V/cm) in the EC unit. The results demonstrated that the pre-treatment SF step can contribute significantly to reducing pollutants’ concentrations in the interning grey water to be treated by EC. In terms of physical impurities, the results showed that the SF pre-treatment step reduced the turbidity and the colour of the treated grey water by 28.5% and 9.4%, respectively. The COD load was also reduced by 25.5% by SF step which allowed to reduce the EC steady state time in EC unit from 45 min to 30 min at an applied voltage of 15V/cm, and a high COD removal of 87.8% from high load grey water can be obtained with an energy consumption of 4.1 kWh/m3 in comparison with 6.2 kWh/m3 without SF step which is equivalent to 34% saving in energy consumption

https://www.researchgate.net/publication/366299790_Impact_of_a_Sand_Filtration_Pre-Treatment_Step_on_High_Loaded_Grey_Water_Treatment_by_an_Electrocoagulation_Technique​