Electron Beam Radiation Coupled to the Reverse Osmosis Membrane Process for Advanced Treatment of Coking Wastewater

Advanced treatment of industrial wastewater is a tough problem in the field of wastewater treatment, and the current advanced treatment processes have some drawbacks, so it is urgent to develop a novel advanced treatment process. In this study, ionizing radiation (electron beam) coupled to the reverse osmosis (IR&RO) process was first developed to treat the effluent of the biologically treated coking wastewater. The results showed that the pretreatment of the biologically treated coking wastewater by ionizing radiation at 2 kGy could simultaneously mitigate the roughness of the RO membrane and obtain a superior chemical oxygen demand (COD) removal effect, in which the maximum membrane flux was found, and the effluent COD of the RO process was 8 mg/L, which is much lower than that obtained by the pretreatment of Fenton and ozone oxidation. Although the addition of H 2 O 2 could increase the treatment capacity of ionizing radiation, the ionizing radiation with H 2 O 2 had no promotion on the performance of the RO process in terms of COD removal. Moreover, compared to sole ionizing radiation, the combination of ionizing radiation with H 2 O 2 increased the roughness of the RO membrane. The results of excitation–emission matrix spectroscopy and Fourier transform infrared spectrum showed that ionizing radiation could regulate the type of intermediate products of organic pollutants in the biologically treated coking wastewater, which further regulates the performance of the RO process. In summary, this study first proved that the IR&RO process can be used as an effective advanced treatment process for industrial wastewater.