Electro-disinfection with BDD-electrodes featuring PEM technology

This work reports the use of a special PEM-electrolyzer equipped with diamond anodes for the highly-efficient disinfection of water preventing the formation of chlorates and perchlorates. The cell is a MIKROZON® cell manufactured by CONDIAS (Itzehoe, Germany) with a very short hydraulic residence time (0.008 s for 90 L h−1, which is the maximum allowable flowrate) and a polymer exchange membrane electrolyte that separates the anode and cathode into a membrane-electrode assembly. This cell can avoid the formation of significant concentrations of chlorates because of the very short contact time between the water and the electrode that prevents the oxidation of hypochlorite by hydroxyl radicals. In this paper, we report tests in which we demonstrate this outstanding performance even in the worst conditions (low flowrate) and we also explain the differences observed in the operation in continuous and discontinuous mode with the same water