Pretreatment of Landfill Leachate Using Hydrodynamic Cavitation at Basic pH Condition

Abstract

The leachate generated from a landfill can cause significant harm to the environment and human health, so it must be treated before being discharged. A biochemical method is effective to treat the landfill leachate, but it requires a physicochemical pretreatment to help reduce the organic load and improve the biodegradability of the landfill leachate. In this work, hydrodynamic cavitation was used to pretreat the landfill leachate due to it being cost-effective, without additional chemicals, and environmentally friendly. The pretreatment experiments were conducted under an inlet pressure of 0.4 MPa and a basic pH. The influence of operating parameters such as the orifice opening rate, the arrangement of orifices, and the reaction time on the chemical oxygen demand, ammonium nitrogen, and biochemical oxygen demand removal in landfill leachate was studied, and the energy efficiency was evaluated. The results showed that under the above conditions, the removal rate for the chemical oxygen demand of the orifice plate with an annular orifice arrangement was better than that of the orifice plate with a radiation orifice arrangement, and the orifice plate with an orifice opening rate of 0.0417 had the best effectiveness. The energy efficiency under these two optimization conditions was also the highest. When the optimal operation time was 60 min, the removal rate of the chemical oxygen demand was 22.63%. The biodegradability of the landfill leachate was significantly improved with BOD5/COD increasing by 57.27%. The study provides a theoretical basis and data support for the application of hydrodynamic cavitation as a low-cost and efficient treatment method in the pretreatment of landfill leachate.