Week 6 - Electro What?

Electrocoagulation, that's what!

This has been a big week for my project moving forward. I was originally tasked myself with looking into ways to effectively remove microplastics from our water and thought reverse osmosis might be the best process to test. However, through further research and conversations I stumbled upon a process called electrocoagulation.  This is essentially a process in which you run a high voltage current through a water source using an aluminum cathode and copper anode. What happens is the free forming electrons and metal ions cause the dipoles of the plastics and other contaminants in the water to attract to each other. This in turn causes them to coagulate and create a sediment and floating mass of all the junk in the water making their removal easy. This has been an exciting development for me as it seems to be a plausible way to add to the wastewater treatment process if it is effective.

 

While this has caused there to be a delay in me starting the project I know I will be playing a little bit of catch up but am excited for the challenge. This week I met with a professor from the physics department and he helped demonstrate how this process works exactly. If you watch the video below you can see how the electrical current causes the metal balls to align themselves with each other. This is a great picture of how the process will work in water with microplastics. 

I am figuring out a few more details and am reworking my research proposal but have the true excitement for this science and cannot wait to see where it leads.