Ozonation degradation of wastewater using rotational hydrodynamic cavitation reactor with a conical rotor

Water pollution caused by an abusive discharge of dye-containing wastewater leads to serious ecological risks. Conventional wastewater treatment methods have shortcomings of incomplete degradation, long-time treatment and secondary pollution. For the first time, a rotational hydrodynamic cavitation reactor (RHCR) equipped with a conical rotor has been designed to enhance the ozonation process for effective degradation of pollutants. The effects of rotational speed, discharge voltage, gas flow rate, liquid flow rate and initial pH on methylene blue (MB) degradation were deeply investigated. The optimised conditions were initial pH = 9, rotational speed = 1800 rpm, discharge voltage = 9.3 kV, gas flow rate = 60 mL/min and liquid flow rate = 80 mL/min. With the integration of ozonation and cavitation in RHCR, the MB degradation efficiency reached 95.2%, which was 15.6% higher than that of the individual ozonation method. The degradation process was proven to track the first-order kinetic model, with the reaction rate and synergy index were 0.232 min^-1 and 1.78, respectively. Through the quenching experiments, it can be confirmed that the contribution proportion of hydroxyl radical during degradation was increased by 8.7% due to the enhancement of cavitation. A required energy consumption of 74.7 kWh/order/m³ and a total expense of 8.7 $/m³ were calculated. The energy consumption of the RHCR was approximately 80% lower than that of the recently reported degradation system combining ozonation and cavitation, with total expense reduced by 52%. The findings of this work provide a new water treatment method and offered theoretical references for the design of RHCR.