Experimental study of microwave-catalytic oxidative degradation of COD in livestock farming effluent by copper-loaded activated carbon

Abstract

ABSTRACT The problem of massive discharge of livestock wastewater is becoming more and more severe, causing irreversible damage to the ecological environment, and how to treat livestock wastewater efficiently and rapidly deserves to be studied in depth. In this work, CuO/granular activated carbon (GAC) loaded catalysts were prepared and characterized by scanning electron microscopy (SEM), X-ray diffraction (XRD), nitrogen adsorption/desorption techniques, and X-ray energy spectroscopy (EDS). The results showed that CuO was successfully attached to the GAC surface with good adsorption performance. The effects of catalyst dosage, H2O2 dosage, initial pH, microwave power and microwave irradiation time in different reaction systems on the degradation efficiency of chemical oxygen demand (COD) in wastewater were investigated, and the orthogonal experiments were used to explore the importance ranking of these factors. The highest degradation rate of COD was found to be enhanced by 12.1% in the reaction system of CuO/GAC, and the initial pH had the greatest effect on the COD removal rate. The combined MW/catalyst/H2O2 method used in this work provided a rapid and effective degradation of COD in wastewater, which can be helpful for reference in other microwave catalytic oxidation studies.