Electrochemical Abatement of Organic Pollutants in Water by Electro- Fenton with Natural Heterogeneous Catalysts Under Pressure

In recent decades, electrochemical advanced oxidation processes (EAOPs) have proved as alternative technologies to conventional processes. Indeed, EAOPs can often allow to treat wastewater containing toxic and POPs. Among them, electro-Fenton (EF) is considered particularly promising for the treatment of recalcitrant organics, since it presents various advantages, including high abatements for many organic pollutants, simplicity of equipment and operations, relatively low cost and low consumption of chemicals. Recently, the utilization of some natural heterogeneous catalysts was proposed in order to avoid some disadvantages of the conventional EF process. In this frame, in this work EF process was performed using both conventional homogeneous FeSO4 and various kinds of natural heterogeneous catalysts as iron catalysts and oxygen at various pressures. The effect of the nature of the catalyst, the oxygen pressure, the current density and the catalyst load was investigated in order to optimize the process. It was shown that the coupled utilization of a natural heterogeneous catalyst and a relatively high pressure allows to obtain high removal of TOC in short times with relatively high current efficiencies. References: [1] Ammar, S., Oturan, M.A., Labiadh, L., Guersalli, A., Abdelhedi, R., Oturan, N., Brillas, E., 2015. Degradation of tyrosol by a novel electro-Fenton process using pyrite as heterogeneous source of iron catalyst. Water Res. 74, 77e87.Reference to a book: [2] Barhoumi, N., Labiadh, L., Oturan, M.A., Oturan, N., Gadri, A., Ammar, S., Brillas, E., 2015. Electrochemical mineralization of the antibiotic levofloxacin by electro- Fenton-pyrite process. Chemosphere 141, 250 - 257. [3] Ltaïef, A. H., Proietto, F., Sabatino, S., Ammar, S., Gadri, A., Galia, A., & Scialdone, O., 2018. Electrochemical treatment of aqueous solutions of organic pollutants by electro-Fenton with natural heterogeneous catalysts under pressure using Ti/IrO2-Ta2O5 or BDD anodes. Chemosphere, 202, 111-118.