Comparative study of kinetic models for electro-oxidation of phenol in a three-dimension electrode reactor

The quite effective electro-oxidation of phenol was experimentally investigated using a three-dimension electrode reactor in this paper. Experiments were conducted to examine the effects of the operating conditions, such as voltage, air-liquid ratio and dosage of NaCl on the phenol removal efficiency. The experimental results shown that the operational factor of applied voltage played the most important rolls in determining the oxidation rate of phenol, and concurrently, the addition of airflow and NaCl could obviously increase the reaction process. Using first-order kinetics to describe the electro-oxidation process of phenol, two different kinetic models were proposed by inspecting the relationship between rate constants and voltage, air-liquid ratio and dosage of NaCl, respectively. Contrasted to the abundant experimental data, a more reasonable kinetic model was obtained for the accurate estimation of phenol concentration outlet during continuous flow of raw wastewater.