369 Digital Proceeding Of The ICOEST’2014 - , SIDE Side, Turkey, May 14 – 17, 2014 Journal of Selçuk University Natural and Applied Science Online ISSN: 2147-3781 www.josunas.org Batch Electrocoagulation Reactor for Natural Organic Matter Removal from Synthetic and Real Water Samples Feride Ulu* 1 , Sibel Barışçı 2 , Mehmet Kobya 3 and Heikki Särkkä 4 , Mika Sillanpää 5 1,2,3 Gebze Institute of Technology, Environmental Engineering Department, Cayırova Campus, 41400, Gebze, Kocaeli, Turkey (E-mail: fulu@gyte.edu.tr, sbarisci@gyte.edu.tr, kobya@gyte.edu.tr) 4,5 Lappeenranta University of Technology, LUT Savo Sustainable Technologies, Laboratory of Green Chemistry, 50130, Mikkeli, Finland (E-mail: Heikki.Sarkka@lut.fi, Mika.Sillanpaa@lut.fi) ABSTRACT The aim of this study was to evaluate the treatability of natural organic matters (NOM) from different origins- synthetically prepared humic acid solution and real water samples- by electrocoagulation (EC) process in batch mode using aluminium electrodes. Two main electrochemical EC parameters, pH and current density (j), were investigated. The removal efficiency of EC process was determined with respect to dissolved organic carbon (DOC) and UV absorbance at 254 nm. The initial pH (pH i ) and current density parameters were studied in the range from 4 to 7.3 and 0.4 to 4.5 mA/cm 2 , respectively. The highest treatment efficiency for humic acid (HA) was 87.5% (DOC treated 2.01 mg/L) at pH i 4 with aluminium electrodes after twenty five minutes of process time. The short term best UV-abs-254% removal performance was obtained after 2 min at the same operation conditions. For Lake Saimaa samples, DOC removal was achieved as 71.1% with final DOC concentration of 4.29 mg/L and 86.2% UV-abs-254 removal was obtained after 25 min at pH i 4 and at current density of 3 mA/cm 2 . The results indicated that EC process is effective for the removal of NOM from water. Keywords: Electrocoagulation; humic acid; natural organic matter; Saimaa. 1. INTRODUCTION Natural organic matters (NOM) that are ubiquitously present in surface and ground waters and adsorbs on most colloidal [1, 2, 3]. The dominant fraction of NOM in natural aquatic environments is composed of humic substances [4]. These have molecular weights of several hundred or larger [5, 6] and carry weakly acidic functional groups,