Applied Math for Water Treatment Grades 3 – 4

In efforts to make package plants more compact, affordable and easier to operate and maintain, it has been noted that the design and performance of some of these plants containing conventional treatment processes is sometimes compromised if technical expertise in this regard is lacking. Generally, there are several risks associated with poorly designed treatment systems, including loss of production, poor safety and compromised equipment and process unit efficiency with associated higher operating and maintenance costs. These risks have more severe consequences in the case of desalination (including water reclamation and water re-use) package plants. The objective of this project is to develop a set of guidelines to assist municipalities, water treatment practitioners, designers and package plant manufacturers in the specification and design of appropriate unit processes and operating parameters to fit the influent water quality, operating environment and other special treatment requirements.

Aluminium in drinking water comes from natural sources and the alum used as coagulant in the water treatment process. Exposure to aluminium has been implicated in dialysis dementia, Parkinson and Alzheimer’s disease. Drinking water containing aluminium was considered to be one of the main sources of Al intake into human body. For this reason, the removal of aluminium from drinking water is vital to our health. In this study, removal of aluminium was carried out by using a chelating resin.

In the presence of free oxygen, aerobic bacteria use the organic matter found in wastewater as “food”. The BOD test is an estimate of the “food” available in the sample. The more “food” present in the waste, the more Dissolved Oxygen (DO) will be required. The BOD test measures the strength of the wastewater by measuring the amount of oxygen used by the bacteria as they stabilize the organic matter under controlled conditions of time and temperature.

Surging population, energy demands, and climate change will push us, ever more urgently, to find new approaches to meet growing water demands. Most often, this will involve harvesting lower quality or impaired water supplies (e.g., seawater or brackish groundwater) as a source for drinking water. Recently desalination using membrane-based processes (e.g., reverse osmosis [RO], electrodialysis [ED], and nanofiltration [NF]) has shown promise for providing additional sources of fresh water across the United States. However, the current membrane separation processes are commonly energy intensive and produce large volumes of concentrated brine which poses unique challenges. Particularly in land-locked urban center brine disposal often relyes on surface water discharge or deep-well injection which pose economic and practical difficulties for wide-spread adoption of such technologies. Thus, there is an urgent need for energy-efficient desalination technologies that reduce the amount of concentrate produced, or identify cost-effective solutions for concentrate management.

•Used for removal of organic pollutants from wastewaters •Biological treatment is popular due to: –low cost –effective in removal of a wide range of organic contaminants –effective in removal of colloidal organics –can remove toxic non-organic pollutants such as heavy metals