Electrochemical Degradation of Reactive Blue 19 Dye in Textile Wastewater

Textile wastewater is notoriously known to contain strong colour, a highly fluctuating pH and significant COD (Chemical Oxygen Demand) values. Because of these characteristics, treatment of these effluents has been rather difficult. Traditional methods for dealing with textile wastewater consist of various combinations of biological, physical and chemical methods. Because of the large variability of the composition of textile wastewaters, most of these traditional methods are becoming inadequate. The aim of this work was to use an electrochemical procedure to treat used dyebaths and cyclic voltammetry (CV) technique for dye degradation study. Electrolysis can be an adequate process for colour removal as well organics pollutants and CV is an important tool for redox reactions interpretation. Electrochemical treatment results show significant decrease on COD values, for the different values of dye concentration and several applied potentials. Progressive colour removal and dye degradation can be achieved for different values of dye concentration. Depending on electrolysis time and applied potential, total decolouration can be attained.