Winery wastewater treatment

Wastewater management is a current topic for wineries, as wastewater treatment accounts for a large part of operating costs. Currently, technologies based on biological processes are mostly used to treat wastewater from wineries. However, these have a number of drawbacks, such as higher investment and operating costs, a large footprint or the requirement for the necessary technical knowledge of the operators. This paper deals with the selection of an economically less demanding technology for the treatment of winery wastewater and the experimental assessment of its efficiency with respect to the removal of chemical oxygen demand (COD). Photo-Fenton oxidation was selected based on a thorough literature search. The Box-Behnken design was used to design of the experiment. Based on the experiment, the optimum operating conditions were found to be temperature 25 °C, pH 3, Fe2+ ion amount 20,2 mg/l, H2O2/Fe2+ ratio 64 and reaction time 3 h. The achievable COD removal efficiency is 11,8 %, which is not consistent with the values reported in the literature. The main reason for the low efficiency could be the insufficient intensity of the UV radiation used. Further research could build on the optimal conditions found and address the shortcomings of this experiment