Tratamento anaeróbio de efluentes contendo corantes e estudos de pós-tratamento e ecotoxicidade

Abstract

Disposal of textile effluents in surface waters represents a serious environmental and public health problem mainly due to the presence of dyes in their composition, many of which are potentially toxic and carcinogenic. The color removal and mineralization of byproducts is the major difficulty faced by the wastewater treatment plants of these industries. This thesis studied the treatment of textile effluents in one-stage and two-stage anaerobic systems, post-treatment options by using aerobic biological and advanced oxidation processes, and use the ecotoxicity tests for the various effluents produced. Experiments were performed in one-stage (R1) and two-stage (R2) anaerobic systems treating real and synthetic textile wastewaters. In these experiments, we evaluated the dye concentration effect, as well as external electron donor concentration, hydraulic retention time (HRT) and the redox mediator anthraquinone-2,6-disulfonate (AQDS) effect on color removal efficiency. Two other one-stage anaerobic systems (R3 and R4) were operated in parallel at the HRT of 12 hours and fed with real textile wastewater to assess the AQDS effect on the decolourisation of real textile effluents. During the aerobic post-treatment, we evaluated the application of sequencing batch reactor (SBR) with 24 hours total cycle to treat synthetic and real textile wastewaters pre-treated in the UASB reactor. We also evaluated the application of UV/H2O2 advanced oxidation process (AOP) to treat real textile wastewaters pre-treated in the UASB reactor, both in terms of color removal and mineralization of byproducts generated upon dye reduction. The evaluation of the effluents toxicity was performed by acute toxicity tests using Daphnia magna as test organism. The results revealed that the two-stage anaerobic system was more stable than the one-stage system for both real and the synthetic dyes Congo Red (CR) and Reactive Black 5 (RB5), and more efficient for the dye RR2 in absence of AQDS. However, in the presence of AQDS, color removal efficiency of RR2 was higher for both systems, masking the effect of phase separation. For real textile wastewater, it was not observed any effect of the AQDS application on R3, even when a short HRT or low electron donor concentration was applied. The aerobic and AOP post-treatments were able to reduce the effluents COD to values lower than the limits defined at the Legislation nº 154 of SEMACE. The UV/H2O2 AOP-type was effective in removing color and COD from both real and synthetic textile effluents. The acute toxicity tests revealed the toxic potential of textile effluents and their by-products as well as the aromatic amines mineralization in anaerobic/aerobic systems.