Wastewater treatment refers to the process of removing pollutants from water previously employed for industrial, agricultural, or municipal uses. The techniques used to remove the pollutants present in wastewater can be broken into biological, chemical, physical, and energetic. These different techniques are applied through the many stages of wastewater treatment.
Classification
- Coagulant
- Flocculant
- Microbial Treatment
Application
- Flocculants and Coagulants when used in conjunction with each other provide an efficient and cost-effective means to remove suspended particles in water solutions or slurries. Some particles would settle out of the water on their own, given enough time, while others would resist settling for days or months due to small particle size and/or electrical charges between the particles.
- Coagulants are primarily used to remove extremely small, suspended particles in solution which do not settle rapidly.
- The flocculant primary use is to bind and agglomerate suspended particles in water to form large particles which assist in their settling and facilitate removal through particle and water separation processes.
- Microbial Treatment – A variety of microbes are used as workhorses for wastewater treatment, and they are cultured to deal with specific waste waters from dairy’s, breweries, or tea factory effluents. Wastewater contains tons of organic matter. These microbes perform a vital role in the breakdown and removal of nutrients and organic matter in the wastewater and convert them into substances that are environmentally beneficial. They feed on the nutrients present in the sewage such as nitrogen, phosphorus, sodium, potassium, iron, calcium, and complexes, for example, fats, sugars, and proteins.
The byproducts of their digestion process are usually gaseous in nature and escape to the environment or are harnessed for reuse example methane gas. This is useful in wastewater treatment as it reduces the biomass in the effluent.
