Cost cutting approach of distillery effluent treatment using solar photovoltaic cell driven electrocoagulation: Comparison with conventional electrocoagulation

This work is an attempt to treat rice grain-based distillery biodigester effluent (BDE) using photovoltaic (PV) cell driven electrocoagulation (EC) process. The BDE initially contain high chemical oxygen demand (COD) of 4252 mg/l and color of 456 PCU.PV cell-based EC reactors have been used to treat BDE with various electrode combination including Fe-Fe, Al-Al, Fe-Al, and Al-Fe etc. The effect of different operating parameters such as pH, current density (CD), electrode gap (g) and electrode combination on COD and color removal efficiency were investigated. Maximum COD and color removal efficiency of 94.9 % and 81.3 %, respectively were found at the optimum condition of pH 7, CD 24.9 mA/cm2, g 1.75 cm, electrolysis time (t) 60 min, electrode loss (Ec) 17.1 mg/land electrode combination of Fe-Fe. A comparative study has been made by powering the EC system through conventional power supply and solar PV source and the PV oriented system was found better. Conventional power source required longer; t and needed slightly higher voltage while, PV system needed shorter t and low voltage to achieve nearly same pollution removal efficiency.