COD and color removal of reactive orange 16 dye solution by electrochemical oxidation and adsorption method

Degradation of Reactive Orange 16 (RO16) dye was investigated using electrochemical oxidation and adsorption (batch method) using mixture of coconut trunk charcoal-graphite-tin-polyvinyl chloride(PVC). In batch studies for adsorbents pellet and powder form of the charcoal mixture were used. RO16 was chosen as the model dye because of its high resistance towards conventional treatment methods. NaCl and RO16 concentration, treatment duration, weight of electrode and adsorbent and volume of solution were kept constant for both methods. The effectiveness of the treatments were compared and evaluated by percentage of RO16 decolorization and chemical oxygen demand (COD) removal and results indicated that electrochemical oxidation method ables to decolorized RO16 dye up to 98.5% after 20 minutes electrolysis time while pellet and powder in batch method only removed 17.1 and 33.6% of RO16 color respectively. However, only 45.6% of COD can be removed using electrochemical oxidation method while pellet and powder in batch method removed 47.8 and 49.6% of COD respectively. The decolorization and COD removal of RO16 was determined using UV-Vis spectrophotometer (by the changes of absorption spectrum intensity of azo chromophore (-N=N-) at λ=388 and 492.50 nm and Hach spectrophotometer respectively. FTIR was used to determine functional groups present in the coconut trunk charcoal.