Page 412 - AWSAR 2.0

388 || AWSAR Awarded Popular Science Stories - 2019
Later, in detail, as a research scholar exclusively in industrial wastewater treatment on inquiring, I came to know the principle cause behind water scarcity is industrial proliferation. Industries alone utilize 10%–15% of the available water and produce a billion litres of wastewater per day. To explain with an example, Tamil Nadu, home to a total of 50% of the textile industries (752 textile mills) in our country, contributes around 45%–53% of wastewater. It is officially declared that textile industries effluents consist of various toxic dyes and hazardous chemical substances that routinely end up in water bodies. Dyes are principal pollutants in textile effluents, and it is found that 15%–25% of dyes directly come into textile wastewater. It is estimated that around 80% of industrial wastewater is discharged into the water bodies without any treatment. This leads to deterioration of various freshwater bodies resulting in a tremendous decrease in clean water availability. Unlike
other industrial wastewaters,
textile wastewater always
remains unique as it produces
coloured wastewater. We
human beings only like to wear
different colours of clothes and
eat colourful food every day.
But, we do not want to flush
even our shit with coloured
water even a single day, and it
becomes a big complaint. Many
awareness programmes are
conducted to create awareness
about the importance of clean
water and getting back our
deteriorated water bodies. The
most recent one is the Cauvery
calling campaign.
In spite of many treatment
technologies existing for textile
wastewater treatment, none of them are successful in the complete degradation of
pollutants. In addition, they produce sludge, which is hectic to handle further. This had drawn our attention to the need for textile wastewater treatment in Tamil Nadu.
Holding this preview, with joint efforts of me and my PhD adviser (Prof. Ligy Philip, IIT Madras), for the first time in the field of hybrid technology, we have successfully coupled two potential wastewater treatment technologies for effective wastewater treatment, which will remove the need of secondary treatment of wastewater. The coupled treatment developed by us is shown below.
A simple electrolytic reactor setup (Electrocoagulation-Flotation) along with pulsed power plasma is coupled in our proposed research. The main advantage of Electrocoagulation-Flotation is the faster removal of colour and pollutant degradation by direct oxidation. However, sludge production and electrode passivation are the main limitations of this process. So keeping this in mind, a potent treatment technology pulsed power plasma treatment (PPT) was coupled with this electrolytic EC-F process. The results from coupling these two processes amazed us by overcoming all the limitations of selected treatment technologies
as individual processes.
I started my research by
collecting original textile wastewater samples from Tirupur (Tamil Nadu) where a large part
Industries alone utilize 10%– 15% of the available water and produce a billion litres
of wastewater per day. To explain with an example, Tamil Nadu, home to a total of 50% of the textile industries (752 textile mills) in our country, contributes around 45%–53% of wastewater. It is officially declared that textile industries effluents consist of various toxic dyes and hazardous chemical substances that routinely end up in water bodies.