Modeling and Simulation of Wastewater Electrocoagulation Reactor

Abstract

Electro-Coagulation (EC) method is the most effective electrochemical treatment of the wastewater that contains heavy metals as pollutants such as (lead compounds). It is consumed less energy compared with the other conventional methods. In this work, the Computational Fluid Dynamics (CFD) modeling approach for the simulation of the EC unit was studied. Transport of species, current-voltage distribution, and fluid flow were simulated using the diffusion, Nernst-Planck, and Navier-Stokes equations, respectively. The commercial software (COMSOL 5.4) was used to solve the system of equations that govern this problem. The influence of different parameters such as Hydraulic Retention Time (HRT) (15-45 min), applied voltage (2-10v) rotating speed of electrode (0-150 rpm) on the EC reactor also has been studied. The extracted results from the simulation show how the voltage, current, velocity and concentration of the pollutant and coagulant are distributed in the reactor. Besides, the transient behavior of the lead removal from the water was demonstrated in this work. The obtained results from this study were compared with experimental results. The theoretical results showed a good prediction of lead removal from water by electrocoagulation system and they showed good agreement between predictive and experimental data.