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Research Paper | Chemical Engineering | Malaysia | Volume 4 Issue 5, May 2015

Effluent Quality of Anaerobic Palm Oil Mill Effluent (POME) Wastewater Using Organic Coagulant

Husna Ahmad Tajuddin ^[2] | Luqman Chuah Abdullah ^[3] | Azni Idris | Thomas S.Y.Choong ^[2]

Abstract: Due to the increasing awareness about the toxicity of inorganic coagulants, several investigations have been done to replace/reduce inorganic coagulants with biodegradable and eco-friendly coagulants/flocculants. Applying Organo-floc coagulant would be a reasonable alternative for the typical inorganic coagulants. Shifting from biological and chemical to coagulation-flocculation treatment could lead to improved effluent treatment as well as gaining additional benefits through the recovery and recycling of water to the plant with minimum treatment. Compared with common chemical flocculants, bio-flocculants (Organo-floc) are safe and as biopolymers are biodegradable, hence the sludge can be efficiently degraded by microorganisms. Alum and organo-floc will be used as coagulants for POME treatment with the aid of flocculant. Dosage of coagulant and flocculant, pH of raw POME, speed and time of rapid mixing were varied accordingly for each run of the experiments was operated to treat wastewater for the simultaneous removal of chemical oxygen demand (COD) and biochemical oxygen demand (BOD) in order to learn more about the integrated system. Coagulation-flocculation organo-floc shows capability to treat anaerobic POME wastewater as great as alum does whereby organo-floc can remove almost 71 % of solid from the wastewater by comparing to alum which only can remove at 65 % of solid but for COD removal alum show 50 % removal higher efficiencies of removal compared to organo-floc.

Keywords: Palm oil mill effluent POME, organo-floc, coagulant, flocculant

Edition: Volume 4 Issue 5, May 2015,

Pages: 667 - 677

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