Oxidation of organics in water in microfluidic electrochemical reactors: Theoretical model and experiments

The electrochemical oxidation of organics in water performed in micro reactors on boron doped diamond (BDD) anode was investigated both theoretically and experimentally in order to find the influence of various operative parameters on the conversion and the current efficiency CE of the process. The electrochemical oxidation of formic acid (FA) was selected as a model case. High conversions for a single passage of the electrolytic solution inside the cell were obtained by operating with proper residence times and low distances between cathode and anode. The effect of initial concentration, flow rate and current density was investigated in detail. Theoretical predictions were in very good agreement with experimental results for both mass transfer control, oxidation reaction control and mixed kinetic regimes in spite of the fact that no adjustable parameters was used. Mass transfer process was successfully modelled by considering for simplicity a constant Sh number (e.g., a constant mass transfer coefficient k m) for a process performed with no high values of the current intensity to minimize the effect of the gas bubbling on the flowdynamic pattern. For mixed kinetic regimes, two different modelling approaches were used. In the first one, the oxidation of organics at BDD was assumed to be mass transfer controlled and to occur with an intrinsic 100% CE when applied current density is higher than the limiting current density. In the second case, the CE of the process was modelled assuming that the competition between organic and water oxidation depends only on the electrodic material and on the nature and the concentration of the organic. In the latter case a better agreement between experimental data and theoretical predictions was observed. © 2011 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.