The textile industry releases a wide range of synthetic dyes that endanger human and environmental health. Even trace amounts of synthetic dye in water can be seen and are toxic to human health. To solve this problem, researchers at the Indian Institute of Technology Jodhpur have developed a two-step approach for textile industry wastewater recovery. In the first step, the sample is electrochemically processed, followed by real-time photocatalytic degradation using novel ZnO caterpillars outgrown over carbon nanofibers in the second step.
This technology has several advantages, including reducing the constraints of each process when used separately, complete pollutant degradation, and no secondary pollution. Colored wastewater from textile industries can be processed using the discovered technique and the treated water reused for a variety of other purposes.
Dr. Ankur Gupta, Assistant Professor, Department of Mechanical Engineering, IIT Jodhpur, and his research scholars Mr. Gulshan Verma and Mr. Prince Kumar Rai, as well as Prof. Jan Gerrit Korvink and Dr. Monsur Islam from the Karlsruhe Institute of Technology in Germany, discovered this two-step process for treating textile wastewater before discharging it into natural water bodies.
Dr. Ankur Gupta, Assistant Professor, Department of Mechanical Engineering, IIT Jodhpur, stated, “We need to think about recycling the wastewater and reusing the water wherever possible.”
Salient features of the research
– The integrated process has a high organic matter removal efficiency and reduces the harsh colours found in real textile samples.
– A simple fabrication method is used to grow ZnO caterpillars over carbon nanofibers on Si substrates using the vapor-liquid-solid method.
– The IoT technique is used to monitor real-time textile wastewater degradation by integrating a NodeMCU microcontroller board and a pH sensor.
It takes 240 minutes for the photocatalytic decolorization process to convert the greenish yellow textile effluent to colourless (99.1%).
By combining electrochemical and photocatalytic degradation processes, significant amounts of TSS (75%) and TDS (80%) were removed from textile wastewater.
Furthermore, the hydrophobic nature (CA:130.35) of the fabricated ZnO caterpillars, combined with electrochemical processing, has opened a new avenue for further exploration and utilisation in industrial wastewater treatment. The laboratory-based proof-of-concept, according to the researchers, can be scaled up to process industrial released effluents and remediate wastewater.
