CHAPTER 1

INTRODUCTION

1.1

Background of study

Water is the most valuable resource and the most passionately use among people
since human civilization start. Water is not merely a physical resource: in every
cultural context it is densely encoded with social, spiritual, and these have a powerful
effect upon patterns of water use by living things. There are many uses of water in
our daily life which includes cooking, drinking, cleaning, bathing, watering our
lawns and so forth. Domestic wastewater is the water that has been used by a
community and which contains all the materials added to the water during its use.
This include the composed of human body waste (feces and urine) plus with the
water used to flushing toilet and sullage which is wastewater produced by personal
wash, laundry, food preparation and kitchen cleaning. Meanwhile, fresh wastewater
is a grey turbid liquid that have dirt-like visual but mild odor. It contains large
suspended solid (such as feces, rags, and bottles), smaller suspended solid (such as
paper, vegetable peel) and very small suspended solid in colloidal suspension. It is
easy to identify base on its appearance and also very harmful in content because of
the pathogen (disease-causing organism) contain. Therefore, the wastewater needs to
be treated before it can be discharged into the river of lakes.
Water treatment processes are designed to achieve improvement in the
quality at the wastewater. The treatment main goals are to reduce the transmission of

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excreta-related diseases and to reduce water pollution and the consequent
damage to aquatic biota. There are three major stages involved in domestic
wastewater treatment. First stage would be primary treatment, and then secondary
treatment lastly will be tertiary treatment stage. Primary treatment of wastewater
consists of the removal of insoluble matter such as grit, grease, and scum from water
including

large tanks commonly called

"pre-

settling basins"

or

"primary

clarifiers", large rakes and skimming devices. Secondary treatment is the process
after primary treatment and it is biological treatment. The last process is tertiary
treatment and it was include advanced wastewater treatment before discharge to the
receiving body such as river and lake (Davis and Cornwell, 2008).
Wastewater may have high contain of ammonia nitrogen and phosphorus
which may lead to eutrophication, an excessive of nutrients in a lake or other body of
water, which causes a dense growth of plant life and death of animal life from lack of
oxygen (Oxford Dictionary, 2014). Since the process can contribute to toxin
production to contaminate the water it is vital to undergo treatment process such as
biological process to remove the ammonia nitrogen since the focus of this study is to
monitor the dissolved oxygen (DO) distribution in the horizontal and vertical aerated
rock filter system. It is expected that different distribution of DO will be observed in
this study due to different hydraulic loading within the proposed systems. It is also
will be concluded the relationship between the removal of ammonia and amount of
DO where if the amount of DO is high the rate of ammonia removal would be more
decent.
Aeration is the process of induced air into wastewater to allow aerobic biodegradation of the pollutant components. It is an integral part of most biological
wastewater treatment systems. Unlike chemical treatment which uses chemicals to
react and stabilize contaminants in the wastewater stream, biological treatment uses
microorganisms that occur naturally in wastewater to degrade wastewater
contaminants. Aeration provides oxygen to bacteria for treating and stabilizing the
wastewater. Oxygen is needed by the bacteria to allow biodegradation to occur. The
supplied oxygen is utilized by bacteria in the wastewater to break down the organic
matter containing carbon to form carbon dioxide and water. Without the presence of
sufficient oxygen, bacteria are not able to biodegrade the incoming organic matter in
a reasonable time. In the absence of dissolved oxygen, degradation must occur under

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septic conditions which are slow, odorous, and yield incomplete conversions of
pollutants.

1.2

Problem Statement

Nitrogen and phosphorous are two main nutrients found in wastewater in high
quantities. Nitrogen is mostly found in the form of nitrates in the water. Some of the
problems associated with high levels of nitrates in drinking water or surface water
are: serious health effects in humans and eutrophication in lakes and ponds. Nitrogen
can deplete dissolved oxygen in receiving waters, stimulate aquatic plant growth,
exhibit toxicity toward aquatic life, present a public health hazard, and affect
the suitability of wastewater for reuse purposes in various forms (Hamdan, 2010).
High levels of Phosphorus in surface water can also cause eutrophication in lakes.
Wastewater from agriculture and sewage contains high levels of these nutrients and
constructed treatment wetlands are capable of reducing their levels.
Recently, the demand for low-cost technology for treating high nutrient
wastewater is incredibly increasing. To fulfill our 2009 Malaysian effluent discharge
regulation before discharging the wastewater into sewer of river, due to this fact
horizontal flow and vertical flow ARF (Steel Slag media) is more suitable method
removing nutrients from the biological process which is more effective than
physicochemical treatments. Since this is a process involving biological matter
dissolve oxygen play a vital role to allow biodegradation to occur. The supplied
oxygen is utilized by bacteria in the wastewater to break down the organic matter
containing carbon to form carbon dioxide and water. Without the presence of
sufficient oxygen, bacteria are not able to biodegrade the incoming organic matter in
a reasonable time. Besides, for nitrification to happen the amount of dissolve oxygen
also contributes in the ammonia removal since nitrification is a process of oxidation
of ammonium to nitrate.

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1.3

Objective of Study

The objective of this research is:

i.

To study the effect of hydraulic loading rate on DO distribution in horizontal

and vertical Flow system.

ii.

To compare DO distribution in aerated and un-aerated condition for

horizontal and vertical flow system.

1.4

Scope of Study

The scopes for this research are as the following:

i.

To understand the existing pilot-scale HFASSF and VFASSF (HLR value of

2.72

ii.

and 1.04

To sampling wastewater sample from aerated and un-aerated filter system

and measure DO from sampling port (horizontal flow = 0 cm, 20 cm, 40 cm,
60 cm, 80 cm, 100 cm and vertical flow = 50 cm, 75cm, 100 cm, 125 cm, 150
cm)

1.5

Limitation of Work

The wastewater sample was taken from experimental station at Taman Bukit Perdana
wastewater treatment plant, Batu Pahat, Johor. This study is to focus on dissolve
oxygen distribution of wastewater at different depth and distance on existing pilot
scale HFASSF and VFASSF system using steel slag as filtration media