Abstract
In recent years, electrochemical methods utilizing reactive electrochemical membranes (REM) have been recognized as the most promising technologies for the removal of organic pollutants from water. In this paper, we propose a 1D convection-diffusion-reaction model concerning the transport and oxidation of oxalic acid (OA) and oxygen evolution in the flow-through electrochemical oxidation system with REM. It allows the determination of unknown parameters of the system by treatment of experimental data and predicts the behavior of the electrolysis setup. There is a good agreement in calculated and experimental data at different transmembrane pressures and initial concentrations of OA. The model provides an understanding of the processes occurring in the system and gives the concentration, current density, potential, and overpotential distributions in REM. The dispersion coefficient was determined as a fitting parameter and it is in good agreement with literary data for similar REMs. It is shown that the oxygen evolution reaction plays an important role in the process even under the kinetic limit, and its contribution decreases with increasing total organic carbon flux through the REM.
Highlights
There are a lot of biorefractory toxic organic pollutants, the removal of which requires the implementation of novel wastewater treatment and drinking water production systems
According to previous studies [38,39], hydroxyl radicals are able to participate in the oxidation of oxalic acid (OA)
When the experiments were carried out at a constant transmembrane pressure (TMP) value (40 mbar) and increasing OA concentrations (c0 = 18–800 mgC/L), the mineralization current efficiency (MCE) value tends to plateau and reaches about 72%, respectively, which indicates that the system is approaching kib a 100
Summary
Publisher’s Note: MDPI stays neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affiliations. [2,3,4,5] This process is based on the removal of organic pollutants by a combination of direct electron transfer from the contaminate (R) to the electrode (Equation (1)) and the generation of a large amount of highly reactive hydroxyl radicals (HO ) from the water discharge on the surface of the electrode (S), which has a high oxygen overpotential (Equation (2)) [6,7]. We present the theoretical analysis based on a one-dimensional model of a flow-through anodic oxidation system This model takes into account both the organic compound oxidation and oxygen evolution reaction.
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