Study of the treated palm oil mill effluent (POME) colour degradation using waste activated sludge (WAS) granule
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Date
2019-06
Authors
Mohammad Shaniy Shafiy Bin Azizan
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Abstract
Waste activated sludge (WAS) granule is produced during the biological treatment of palm oil mill effluent (POME) in the Sequential Batch Reactor (SBR). Generally, POME is being treated using biological treatment to reduce the organic content in it to below the permitted limit. In spite of that, the colour of treated POME still the same after the treatment. In this study, the WAS granule is used as adsorbent and the treated POME used as adsorbate. The preliminary experiment was conducted with different methods to pre-treat WAS granule namely, drying, acid pre-treatment and alkaline pre-treatment. The purpose of the preliminary experiment to identify which methods will make the WAS granule as good adsorbent. Based on the result, the alkaline pre-treatment method shows the highest percentage removal of turbidity (92.16%). The alkaline treatment was chosen as the pre-treatment method. Next, the experiment was conducted with different parameters namely, adsorbent dosage, initial concentration of treated POME and contact time of the adsorption process. The adsorption process attains equilibrium within 60 minutes which it means that the adsorption process stops within 60 minutes due to the non-availability of active sites. The result show that the percentage removal of turbidity increases with increasing contact time of the adsorption process and initial concentration of treated POME. However, for the effect of adsorbent dosage the percentage removal of turbidity decreases with increasing the WAS granule dosage. The characterization of WAS granule was analysis using scanning electron microscope and can be concluded that the adsorption process does not depend on the porosity since there are no pores found on the surface of WAS. Moreover, fourier transform infra-red spectrometer is used to analysis for the characterization of WAS granule and several
functional groups was found in the WAS granule. The adsorption isotherm was described by Langmuir isotherm and Freundlich isotherm. It was found that the Freundlich isotherm fit well. The R2 value for Freundlich isotherm is 0.97 which close to 1. The adsorption intensity (n) value is 1. In conclusion, the WAS granule can be a good adsorbent to remove the colour concentration in treated POME.