Enhanced organic wastewater treatment performance in electrochemical filtration process of coal-based carbon membrane via the simple Fe2+ addition

Electrochemical filtration process (EFP) which adopted the coal-based carbon membrane (CCM) as both anode and filter was successfully applied for organic wastewater treatment and presented the promising prospects. In this work, a further enhancement on the wastewater treatment performance of EFP was achieved through the simple Fe 2+ addition (Fe-ECM). The mechanism of the enhanced treatment performance for Fe-ECM system was explored and the effect of operational parameters on the wastewater treatment performance of Fe-ECM system were studied. Results showed that Fe-ECM system established an almost 100% removal efficiency for 250 ppm RhB simulated wastewater when 13.2 μM Fe 2+ was added in the system, which was much higher than that of membrane filtration by CCM or electrochemical filtration carbon membrane (ECM) system. The performance enhancement of Fe-ECM system was attributed to the Fenton process: the hydrogen peroxide (H 2 O 2 ) was electrochemically generated on CCM via the reaction between H 2 O and dissolved oxygen, thus more hydroxyl radical (·OH) was produced in the Fe-ECM system compared with the ECM system through Fenton reaction between the generated H 2 O 2 and Fe 2+ in the solution. Moreover, the Fe-ECM system displayed a good applicability for the decontamination of different organic wastewater and a good reusability was observed for several cycles operation. This work provided an alternative way to enhance the organic wastewater treatment performance of ECM process.