Electro-oxidation and Nanofiltration Coupling for wastewater treatment – CElectrON

CElectrON project aims to contribute to the sustainable management of a vital natural resource, water, throughout the development of an innovative technology based on the coupling of nanofiltration, a membrane separation process, and the electro-Fenton process, an advanced oxidation process. This one-pot technology should ensure the treatment and recycling of water involved into industrial processes. The treatment directly at the pollution source allows a better knowledge of the pollutants and thus of their degradation avoiding at the same time their mixture with other effluents.
Our strategy is based on the study of factual situations: wastewater from the pharmaceutical industry. Indeed, these effluents represent a source of bio-refractory micropollutants that cannot be released in nature directly. Currently, compatible and reliable technologies, developed to treat and recycle the pollutants by avoiding associated water wastage at the same time, are still missing. If this project were successful, it would be easily foreseeable to apply this innovative coupling technology to other wastewater effluents treatment showing a persistent organic characteristic, such as effluents from industry, hospital and agriculture with a low flux, etc.

More precisely, the major scientific and technical objectives of CELectrON project are: (i) the elaboration of conductive nanofiltration membranes based on carbon graphite and/or TiOx that will allow the nanofiltration/electrochemical oxidation coupling, (ii) optimization of organic pollutants degradation upon electro-Fenton process using the prepared membranes aiming to establish correlations between geometry, structure, hydrodynamic conditions, physico-chemical characteristics of the medium to be treated and the applied electrical current, (iii) implementation of the baromembrane filtration and electro-Fenton coupling process, (iv) design and dimensioning of a system that may be directly integrated to the rejection source of the targeted pollutants to allow therefore the water treatment and recycling directly at its use point and (v) the study of the environmental impact and technico-economic analysis of the original proposed technology.