ABSTRACT
The scarcity of hydric resources and industrial wastewater discharging have become worldwide threats. This chapter reviews the fundamentals of electrocoagulation (EC), the factors that affect its performance on wastewater treatment, and the promising materials employed to treat effluents from several industries. It describes future perspectives of the use of possible combinations of EC with other kinds of wastewater treatments, as conventional techniques or nonconventional technologies in order to improve the pollutant removal performance and to exploit the properties of several materials that can be employed during the EC process. The EC process is usually performed at room temperature, however, some works have reported the effect of temperature on the removal efficiency of industrial wastewaters by EC. Solution conductivity is an important parameter that affects the removal performance and operating cost of EC treatment. The applied current passing through the circuit depends on the conductivity of the wastewater at a specified applied voltage.
