The Study of Semi-Continuous Chemical Physical Treatment System for Pollutant Removal in Palm Oil Mill Effluent

Abstract

Effluent from palm oil mill processing is a major concern due its properties and characteristics that highly contributed to water pollution. This study reported on POME treatment by a semi-continuous treatment system consisting of coagulation, sedimentation and filtration processes in the presence of a by-product coagulant (copperas combined with lime). The treatment was conducted for different types of filter medias (FMs): a) FM 1: sand+activated carbon and b) FM 2: sand+ceramic ring) and various retention times (RT) from 1/2 to 2 h. The treatment resulted in different removal efficiencies of turbidity, colour, chemical oxygen demand (COD) and total suspended solids (TSS) for secondary and tertiary POME samples. With semi-continuous treatment, the pollutants in the secondary POME sample decreased, resulting in the removal efficiency of 57.34% for turbidity, 95.16% for colour, 82.08% for COD and 83.23% for TSS. Meanwhile, the results of the tertiary sample were 54.81%, 81.08%, 78.05% and 68.51% for turbidity, colour, COD and TSS removal respectively. The statistical analysis of ANOVA (p-value<0.05) indicated that the data was statistically significant with the FM 1 as a media filter. As a result, a semi-continous chemical-physical treatment system may provide information in efficient POME treatment.