Boron Doped Diamond (BDD) - A Revolutionary in Wastewater Treatment

Facing the current environmental challenges, the textile, leather, printing and dyeing, paper, food and pharmaceutical industries generate large quantities of organic wastewater. Conventional treatment methods often struggle to efficiently degrade these difficult to degrade pollutants. However, an advanced solution has emerged with high efficiency, low energy consumption and excellent electrocatalytic performance: boron doped diamond (BDD) electrodes.

Studies have shown that BDD is an environmentally friendly new electrode material, and the electrochemical method as an anode has demonstrated excellent removal of a wide range of difficult-to-degrade organic pollutants and macromolecules, such as dyes, pesticides, antibiotics, endocrine disruptors, etc., and almost all of them can be completely mineralized.

BDD electrodes have shown excellent ability in treating different kinds of wastewater, especially hard-to-degrade organic compounds. The key lies in the electrochemical advanced oxidation technology, where the BDD electrode generates strongly oxidizing hydroxyl radicals (-OH) with an oxidation potential of about 2.8 V (SHE). These radicals efficiently oxidize organic pollutants into harmless CO₂, H₂O and inorganic substances.

BDD electrodes are unique because of their wide electrochemical window (close to 4.5V), low background current, high oxygen precipitation potential (close to 3V), excellent corrosion resistance, chemical stability, mechanical strength, and resistance to adsorption. This enables BDD electrodes to maintain their pristine surface condition during prolonged, high-current-density electrolysis, which is difficult to achieve with other electrode materials.

In response to the market demand, CSMH has introduced boron doped single crystal diamond which can be doped from low concentration to high concentration. Low concentration doped which diamond has good mobility and is suitable to be used as the main material for semiconductor devices; high concentration doped boron diamond has low resistivity and is suitable to be used as the electrode for ohmic contact. At present, the company's products: diamond heat sinks (thermal conductivity 1000-2200W/(m.k)), diamond wafers (surface roughness Ra<1nm), diamond window slices, diamond heterogeneous integrated composite substrates have been used in aerospace, high-power semi-heterodyne lasers, optical communications, heat dissipation of forest tablets, nuclear fusion and other fields.