New waste water treatment technology

Low and medium-scale enterprises in automobile, food, and other sectors would soon have access to a new wastewater treatment technology that would reduce the high costs of existing technologies for handling oily wastewater generated at their source points.

Context

Low and medium-scale enterprises in automobile, food, and other sectors would soon have access to a new wastewater treatment technology that would reduce the high costs of existing technologies for handling oily wastewater generated at their source points.

The technology

• The new technology, which consists of an affordable electric field-assisted membrane separation device for oily wastewater treatment, is developed by Dr Chiranjib Bhattacharjee, Professor at the Chemical Engineering Department in Jadavpur University, Kolkata.
• It has been built with support from the Advanced Manufacturing Technologies programme of the Department of Science & Technology (DST).
• This technology uses a combination of Electrocoagulation and Electroflotation Enhanced Membrane Module (ECEFMM) techniques for waste water treatment.
• So far, the separation technology running in different sectors for treating such oily wastewater involves the installation of an electrolytic cell or DAF followed by membrane unit.
• However, installing two separate units requires a high footprint area compared to the present unit, where two-unit operations are being assimilated in a single unit.

Electrocoagulation

• It is a broad-spectrum treatment technology that removes total suspended solids (TSS), heavy metals, emulsified oils, bacteria and other contaminants from water.
• This technique that uses electrical charge for changing the particle surface charge, allowing suspended matter to form aggregates.

Electroflotation

• Electroflotation is the separation of suspended particles from water using hydrogen and oxygen bubbles generated by passing electricity through water.