| Summary: | Background: Industrial wastewaters containing high amounts of compounds such as sulfate can
cause serious risks to human health and environment. Therefore, proposing practical solutions with
the lowest cost and the highest efficiency for pollutants removal is of special importance. The purpose
of this study is to find a suitable method for treatment wastewater containing very high amounts of
sulfate.
Materials and Methods: This research is an experimental-research study in which four different
practical methods have been investigated for treatment of sulfate containing wastewater including
chemical precipitation with lime, electrocoagulation, biological degradation and thermal distillation.
Results: After examining the performance of different methods and considering the special
characteristics of wastewater, the results showed that the methods of chemical precipitation (removal
efficiency of 5%) and electrocoagulation (removal efficiency of 7%) were less efficient. The distillation
process also showed an acceptable performance in removing TDS and sulfate from this wastewater
(removal efficiency of 98.7%) and the biological method could function well after wastewater dilution
(the removal percentage of sulfate in the first 24 hours for wastewater with dilutions of 10, 25 and
50%, are about 55, 40 and 17%, respectively).
Conclusions: According to the results obtained from this study, methods of chemical precipitation
and electrocoagulation are proposed only as a pre-treatment method and biological treatment can be
used as a supplementary treatment after pre-treatment. Distillation is also not recommended as a
practical method due to high cost and energy consumption.
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