A Boron‐Doped Diamond Anode for the Electrochemical Removal of Parabens in Low‐Conductive Solution: From a Conventional Flow Cell to a Solid Polymer Electrolyte System

Abstract

Solution conductivity plays a fundamental role for the employment of electrochemical advanced oxidation processes (EAOPs) and in the determination of their energy consumption. In this paper, a conventional flow cell based on a boron‐doped diamond (BDD) anode that requires the addition of supporting electrolyte, is compared with a cell setup based on solid polymer electrolyte (SPE). The new cell configuration avoids the addition of salt to increase solution conductivity. The performances of the two systems are compared for the treatment of different solutions containing methylparaben, ethylparaben and propylparaben. Both systems are able to remove all the three parabens, but the SPE‐system provided a better performance, with a maximum COD removal of 91 % and energy consumption of 16.25 kWh m−3, whereas the conventional system can remove a maximum of 81 % consuming 10.92 kWh m−3. The influences of parameters such as current density, flow conditions and supporting electrolyte concentration were analyzed, and results confirm that the SPE system is a promising system to treat low‐conductive solutions polluted by parabens.

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“…where ∆(COD) exp is the experimental COD difference between the initial COD and COD at time t, F is the Faraday constant (96,487 C mol −1 ), V s is the solution volume (L), I is the applied current (A), 8 is the equivalent mass of oxygen (g eq −1 ), t is time (s) and ∆t is the electrolysis is time interval (s). Afterwards, the energy consumption (EC) was estimated by Equation ( 2) in terms of kWh kgCOD −1 [26,27] with the average cell voltage registered during the EO (cell voltage being reasonably constant with just some minor fluctuations; for this reason, the average cell voltage was estimated),…”