Waste Water Cleanup by Aerosol Pulsed Corona Reactor

Summary form only given. This paper presents a study of waste water treatment by multielectrode corona reactor. A mixture of gas and polluted water aerosol flows through the 1.2-m length reactor. The flow rate is 200 l/h. A nanosecond solid state power supply (45 kV, 60 ns, up to 1 kHz) was used as a driver for the corona discharge. The cleaning experiments had carried out with a simulant and industrial waste water. Authors have investigated a simulant PEG300 to demonstrate the corona reactor in cracking of long chain organic molecules into smaller ones. As a result of the simulant treatment the ratio between the biological oxygen demand (BOD) to the chemical oxygen demand (COD) increased from below 0.01 to almost 0.5. The reactor has been used also for a treatment of a brewery effluent. The following conclusions were made: i. Treatment in the aerosol reactor removes up to 50% of the recalcitrant COD in the effluent; ii. Ammonia nitrogen is oxidized to nitrate nitrogen during treatment in the reactor; iii. The effect on phosphates is limited. Tests with concentrated waste water of a packaging recycling company have demonstrated the improvement of biodegradability. These tests showed an increase in COD removal to up to 60%, meaning that after the treatment in the corona aerosol reactor the HOD/COD ratio had increased. Thus, the aerosol corona reactor technology offers good opportunities to treat waste water that are not likely to be treated biologically at the moment.