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Browsing by Author "Silva, Alexandre Narcizo da"

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  • Treatment of wastewater from the olive pomace oil extraction industry by Fenton
    Publication . Silva, Alexandre Narcizo da; Martins, Ramiro; Mees, Juliana B.
    The olive pomace oil extraction industry (OPOEI) has shown significant growth, with an average of 4% annually since 2019, indicating its economic importance in the European Union (EU). Consequently, this industry generates large amounts of wastewater, approximately 1 m3/ton of processed olive pomace, corresponding to about 5.4 million m3/year worldwide. Industrial wastewater has a high content of suspended solids, pungent odor, high turbidity, low biodegradability, high organic content, mainly Chemical Oxygen Demand (COD), increased range of phenolic compounds, dark color, and antibacterial properties, making biological treatment difficult, because of its low biodegradability, toxicity to most microorganisms, and acidic pH (3-6). The composition of olive mill wastewater is complex. Usually, conventional treatments do not have a positive effect on the removal of pollutants. Therefore, new treatment techniques are required for the removal of these compounds. The Advanced Oxidation Process (AOP) by the Fenton process involves the use of hydrogen peroxide (H2O2) and ferrous ions (Fe2+) at acidic pH to produce hydroxyl radicals that are capable of degrading organic compounds that are difficult to biodegrade. In this sense, to remove the high organic content (45 – 107 g L-1), and high concentration of phenolic compounds (2.7 – 8.1 g L-1) of this wastewater, an design of experiments was developed by Response Surface Methodology (RSM) based on the Box-Behnken Design (BBD) method, correlating three factors: H2O2 concentration, Iron2+ amount, and pH. For this, we performed 15 experiments, where 12 tests considered the intermediate, maximum, and minimum values for the concentration of reagents and pH; the other three tests corresponded to the central points and were equally analyzed to verify the reliability of the method, formerly developed by Box-Behnken. Thus, the best results obtained in this approach were 90% for COD and more than 99% for Total Phenolic Compounds (TPC), proving the efficiency of Fenton's methodology applied to this effluent.
    2023Master thesis Open access Show more