Chemical coagulation and sonolysis for total aromatic amines removal from anaerobically pre-treated textile wastewater: A comparative study

The present study primarily focuses on the evaluation of the comparative effect of chemical coagulation and ultrasonication for elimination of aromatic amines (AAs) present in anaerobically pretreated textile wastewater containing different types of dyes including azo dyes. Color and COD reduction was also monitored at the optimized conditions. The production of AAs was measured spectrophotometrically in the form of total aromatic amines (TAAs) and also verified with high performance liquid chromatography (HPLC) selectively. A composite coagulant, magnesium chloride (MC) aided with aluminium chlorohydrate (ACH) in an equal ratio (MC + ACH) was utilized during the coagulation process, which yielded 31% of TAAs removal along with 85% of color and 52% of COD reduction. At optimized power (200 W) and sonication time (5 h), an appreciable TAAs degradation efficiency (85%) was observed along with 51% color reduction and 62% COD removal using ultrasonication. The chromatographic data indicate that sulphanilic acid and benzidine types of aromatic amines were produced after the reductive cleavage of utilized textile dyes, which were effectively mineralized after ultrasonication. The degradation followed the first order kinetics with a correlation coefficient (R 2 ) of 0.89 and a first-order kinetic constant (k) of 0.0073 min -1 .