Using RuO₂ anode for chlorine dioxide production in an un-divided electrochemical cell

Chlorine dioxide is a well known powerful disinfectant. Although there are several chemical and electrochemical methods developed for on-line chlorine dioxide generation, the details are mostly confined as patents. We studied in this work the electrochemical generation of dissolved chlorine dioxide from an un-buffered solution of sodium chlorite and sodium chloride mixture in an un-divided electrochemical cell set-up with RuO₂-coated-Ti anode and Pt-coated-Ti cathode under constant current mode. Various process parameters including feed flow rate (10 to 150 ml/min), feed solution pH (2.3 to 9.4), concentration of sodium chloride (0 to 170 mM), concentration of sodium chlorite (0 to 7.7 mM), and the applied current (100 to 1,200 mA) were optimized. Experiments were conducted by performing single pass experiments, with no circulation. The current efficiency and the power consumption were calculated for the optimized conditions, and compared with IrO₂ electrode of our previous investigation.