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Boosting seawater denitrification in an electrochemical flow cell.

Ding LiShuang-Cheng JiangJia-Fang XieJian ZhangYing-Lian ZhengQuan-Bao ZhaoHan-Qing Yu
Published in: Water research (2024)
Nitrogen compounds in current seawater treatment processes typically are converted to nitrate, threatening seawater quality and marine ecology. Electrochemical denitrification is a promising technique, but its efficiency is severely limited by the presence of excess chloride ions. In this work, a flow-through cell went through an on-demand chlorine-mediated electrochemical-chemical tandem reaction process was designed for efficient seawater denitrification. Equipped with ultrathin cobalt-based nanosheets as the cathode catalyst and commercial IrO 2 -RuO 2 /Ti as the anode, the newly designed flow-through cell achieved nitrate removal efficiency that was about 50 times greater than the batch cell and nearly 100 % N 2 selectivity. Moreover, nitrite and ammonia can also be removed with over 93 % efficiency in total nitrogen (TN) removal. Furthermore, the concentration of active chlorine in the effluent could be adjusted within two orders of magnitude, enabling on-demand release of active chlorine. Finally, this flow-through cell reduced the TN of actual mariculture tailwater (40.1 mg N L -1 nitrate) to only 5.7 mg N L -1 , meeting the discharge standard for aquaculture tailwater of Fujian, China. This work demonstrates the paradigm of deep denitrification from ultra-concentrated chlorine ion wastewater using an on-demand active chlorine-mediated electrochemical-chemical tandem reaction process.
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