Chemical-Free Greywater Treatment Using Aeration, Sedimentation, Followed by Granular Activated Carbon Filter (GAC) -A Case Study of Baghdad city household

Marwa M Ali,Nawar Omran Ali,Mahdi Shanshal Jaafar

doi:10.31026/j.eng.2020.10.05

Marwa M Ali, Nawar Omran Ali + Show 1 more

Open Access

https://doi.org/10.31026/j.eng.2020.10.05

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Abstract

Greywater is a possible water source that can be improved for meeting the quality required for irrigation. Treatment of greywater can range from uncomplicated coarse filtration to advanced biological treatment. This article presents a simple design of a small scale greywater treatment plant, which is a series of physical and natural processes including screening, aeration, sedimentation, and filtration using granular activated carbon filter and differentiates its performance with sand filter. The performance of these units with the dual filter media of (activated carbon with sand) in treatment of greywater from Iraqi house in Baghdad city during 2019 and that collected from several points including washbasins, kitchen sink, bathrooms, and laundry, was recorded in terms of removal efficiency of particular pollutants like Turbidity 94%, chemical oxygen demand (COD) 93%, and oil 91%. Dual filter was the most effective filter for decreasing these pollutants, while sand indicates the lowest removal efficiency. In general, granular activated carbon media seemed to be the most proper medium to improve greywater quality for reaching the quality of irrigation within the terms of organic matter decrease. Accordingly, this technology may be reliable for greywater treatment in a residential area.

Highlights

Euphrates and Tigris Rivers are the primary source of water in Iraq, which produces a high agricultural used water percentage for thousands of years
There are several advantages for the separation operation of the blackwater from greywater that includes the amount of energy used about 11.8–37.5% of that energy corresponding to the sewage treatment processes (Al-Gheethi, et al, 2015), being the most significant wastewater stream in the household, presenting low concentrations of nutrients
The results explained that the nylon rope filter recorded better execution in the filtration unit as compared to dual filters, plus individually used the activated carbon filter

Summary

Introduction

Euphrates and Tigris Rivers are the primary source of water in Iraq, which produces a high agricultural used water percentage for thousands of years. Iraq suffered from water scarcity sources because of global climate variations and the inequitable water politics of the adjacent countries (Al-haddad and Al-Safi, 2015). In this regard, Baghdad city faced numerous issues concerning deteriorations of the freshwater environment because of several reasons, principally was discharging of wastewater without sufficient treatment (KIhudair and Jasim, 2017). Greywater is a possible water source, which may be upgraded to meet the irrigation quality required (Dalahmeh, et al, 2012) In this regard, aeration process may be helpful to do this since it is defined as the method of bringing air and water into approaching contact with each other (Ghernaout, 2014) to reduce unwanted water pollutants, by oxidizing several natural organic matters (NOM), (Ghernaout, et al, 2014) and enhancing the treatability of water. Assess proper filters for small-scale greywater treatment was the general aim of the research, to provide treated water to use it in the crop irrigation

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