5 things you need to know about coagulants and flocculants!
4 Surprising Facts About Coagulant For Water Treatment
June 28, 2022
This article will explain you about 5 things you need to know about coagulants and flocculants.
Clean water sources are essential to ensure the safety of all users or consumers. If contaminated water is used for daily activities, the possibility of becoming infected with an undesired illness may arise.
Therefore, it is crucial for water treatment plant owners to treat the water to ensure the safety and sustainable water supply.
The common methods for water treatment are coagulants and flocculants, sedimentation, filtration, disinfection, sludge drying, fluoridation, and pH correction. coagulants and flocculants is one of the most important steps in water purification, especially for metal ion destabilisation and removal.
However, what do coagulants and flocculants mean and what are the things that you need to know about them? Let’s find out together 5 things that you need to know about the coagulation/flocculation process.
1. Coagulation in water treatment and everyday life
Coagulation is a rapid process of mixing raw or untreated water with liquid aluminium chloride, aluminium chlorohydrate, aluminium sulphate(alum), ferric chloride, and/or a polymer. The dirt particles in the water coagulate or stay together because of the combination.
The dirt particles then stick together to create larger particles known as flocs, which can be easily removed via filtration or settling.
While coagulation is typically used in water treatment, it is relatively a natural phenomenon that occurs in everyday life. For example; when milk turns sour, the decrease in the pH will cause fat particles to destabilize and then coagulate.
2. Flocculation process
Flocculation happens when the particles aggregates by the use of polymers that binds them together.
A flocculation polymer is a polymer that usually with charged sites. By utilizing a polymer with the opposite charge as the particles to be flocculated, the particles will be bonded to the polymer (due to the opposite charges).
It will, later on, result in bigger particles that cannot stay suspended. Coagulant and flocculant involve a successive step in which neither will work if one fails.
3. Types of coagulants and flocculants
There are two types of coagulant and flocculant: organic and inorganic. Metal salts, mainly iron or aluminum, make up the inorganic compounds.
Organic compounds, on the other hand, are polymers that represent a wide range of water-soluble macromolecular compounds of natural or synthetic origin, improving suspended particle flocculation.
The selection of coagulant and flocculant depends on the type of waste to be removed and the cost
4. Where to apply flocculants and coagulants?
Coagulation/flocculation technology is widely used in the treatment of water for drinking, residential and industrial use. It plays an essential role in water pollution control by removing contaminants from industrial wastewater, sewage, and even petroleum refinery effluent before being discharged into the environment.
It eliminates a wide spectrum of pollutants that affect water quality such as metal ions, total suspended solids (TSS), total dissolved solids (TDS), chemical oxygen demand (COD), turbidity, and dyes.
5. Natural flocculant as future technology
Natural flocculants are gaining popularity these days because of their capacity to be a long-term sustainable technology since it does not require the use of chemicals, making them a more appealing option than chemical flocculants (example: synthetic organic polymers).
Natural flocculants can be made from plantago, ovata, moringa olifiera, okra, chitosan, and other materials. Natural starch can also be utilised as a natural help. Natural flocculants have several advantages, including renewability, biodegradability, nontoxicity, and relative cost-effectiveness.
However, because of the biodegradability of the active component, natural flocculants tend to have a shorter shelf life. As a result, floc will lose its effectiveness.
There you have it, those are the 5 things you need to know about coagulation-flocculation in water treatment. Coagulation-flocculation is a proven technology in surface water remediation and sewage treatment which has now been widely used in plenty of water treatment occasions.
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