Electrochemical mineralization of dimethyl sulfoxide on boron-doped diamond electrodes

Dimethyl sulfoxide (DMSO) is an excellent organic solvent, and widely used in laboratories and industries. Therefore, plenty amount of wastewater containing DMSO have been discharged. As the DMSO is high resistant to biological process which is mostly used for wastewater treatments, other strong treatments are needed. Electrochemical oxidation using boron-doped diamond (BDD) anode is a promising method due to effective generation of free hydroxyl radicals which are quite strong oxidizing agents. In this work, a simulated wastewater containing DMSO was treated by the anodic oxidation using BDD electrodes. We found that BDD electrodes could oxidize and completely mineralize DMSO. Removal of total organic carbon was more than 99% after the electrolysis for 5 h using BDD electrodes. This is first observation for the electrochemical mineralization of persistent DMSO. Moreover, BDD electrodes enabled to mineralize DMSO without electrolytic corrosion at low current densities and high pH of the solution for the treatments.