Search

The pulsed electric field (PEF) technology has a potential use in several disciplinarians such as the food industry for bacterial inactivation, molecular biology for electroporation, biomedicine, DNA insertions, medical therapies, and genetic. Although PEF technology has been used in wastewater treatment for the effective elimination of organic compounds in environmental science, PEF is quite new used for sludge pretreatment. There are only a limited number of researches on these subjects. The success of this technique is depending on the formation of strong electrical field discharge, which can be generated by applying high pulsed voltage (10-50 kV) to electrodes. Various parameters might be effective on PEF process performance including the type of microorganisms, field intensity, pulse wave shape, conductivity, pH and temperature of the medium, treatment time (flow rate), and energy input. In this paper, we describe such a pulsed electric field (PEF) technology that was developed as a sludge treatment process. We were performed simulations of electric field distributions inside the lab-scale PEF treatment chamber using a CST Studio software and PEF treatment reactor tested under laboratory conditions. The optimum PEF operation conditions was achieved at 4 mS/cm of conductivity, 5 ml/min. of flow-rate and 54 kV voltage for waste sludge treatment. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]