Textile Wastewater Treatment on a Spinning Disc Reactor: Characteristics, Performances, and Empirical Modeling

Abstract

Spinning disc (SD) technology has been successfully applied, for the first time, in real textile wastewater treatment with no other additional processing. The SD efficiency was investigated using real textile effluents to study the color and suspended solids removals at different effluent-supplying flowrates (10–30 L/h) and different disc rotational speeds (100–1500 rpm) with good experimental results; thus, it can minimize the polluting loads within a short time period. Furthermore, within this study, process modeling and its classical optimization were applied to SD technology for wastewater treatment. The experiments were organized according to an active central composite rotatable 23 order design, considering as independent variables the wastewater flowrate, rotational speed, and operating time and, as optimization criteria, the suspended solids removal and discoloration degree. Overall, this novel study proved that the SD technology applied in textile effluent treatment is a suitable alternative to a primary mechanical step.