Various methods for dyes removal and their advantages and disadvantages.

Methods Advantages Disadvantages

Physical method:
Adsorption: Economically attractive, good
removal efficiency, waste to treat
another waste, effective adsorbent
due to cellular structure, good
sorption for specific colorant.
Ineffective against disperse and vat
dyes, the regeneration is expensive
and results in loss of the adsorbent,
non-destructive process

Chemical Methods:
Oxidation:
1. Fenton’s reagent Capable of decolorizing wide Prohibitively expensive
variety of waste. No alteration in
2. Ozonation volume
Effective for azo dye removal Not suitable for dispersed dyes.
Coagulation: Release aromatic amines
Short detention time and low Hi
capital costs. Good removal gh sludge production, handling and
efficiencies. disposal problem.
Biological Methods:

Aerobic process: Color removal is facilitating along Longer detention time and substrates
with COD removal. specific removal.

Anaerobic Process: Resident to wide variety of Less resistant to recakitrant. Longer

complex colorant. Biogas is acclimatization phase.
produced is used for steam
generation.

Preliminary Treatment
The first stage of the treatment process uses screens to remove the larger solid inorganic
material such as paper and plastics. This is followed by the removal of particles such as
grit and silt which are abrasive to plant equipment.

Primary Treatment
Following preliminary treatment, wastewater is passed through a primary sedimentation
tank where solid particles of organic material are removed from the suspension by
gravity settling. The resultant settled primary sludge is raked to the center of the tank
where it is concentrated and pumped away for further treatment.

Secondary Treatment
This next stage is a biological process which breaks down dissolved and suspended
organic solids by using naturally occurring micro-organisms. It is called the activated
sludge process. The settled wastewater enters aeration tanks where air is blown into the
liquid to provide oxygen for mixing and to promote the growth of micro-organisms. The
“active biomass” uses the oxygen and consumes organic pollutants and nutrients in the
wastewater to grow and reproduce.
From the aeration tanks, the mixture of wastewater and micro-organisms passes into a
secondary sedimentation tank (also known as a clarifier) where the biomass settles under
gravity to the bottom of the tank and is concentrated as sludge.

Some of this sludge is recycled to the inlet of the aeration tank to maintain the biomass,
hence the name for the process – activated sludge. The remainder is pumped to
anaerobic digesters for further treatment.

The clarified wastewater is discharged from the secondary clarifier and passes through
for Tertiary Treatment.

Tertiary Treatment
All wastewater treatment plants use disinfection for tertiary treatment to reduce
pathogens, which are micro-organisms which can pose a risk to human health.

Chlorine is usually dosed into the treated wastewater stream for disinfection. However,
Bolivar uses large ponds in which sunlight and other micro-organisms reduce the
pathogens. Additional treatment may be required if the treated wastewater is reused for
purposes such as irrigation of food crops or where close human contact may result.

Tertiary treatment, such as that provided at Bolivar through the Dissolved Air Flotation
Filtration (DAFF) plant, produces a much higher standard of treated wastewater suitable
for these purposes. The DAFF plant filters and disinfects the wastewater from the ponds
allowing it to be used for direct irrigation of crops through the Virginia Pipeline Scheme.

Sludge Treatment
Sludge collected during the treatment process contains a large amount of biodegradable
material making it amenable to treatment by a different set of micro-organisms, called
anaerobic bacteria, which do not need oxygen for growth.

This takes place in special fully enclosed digesters heated to 35 degrees Celsius, where
these anaerobic micro-organisms thrive without any oxygen.

The gas produced during this anaerobic process contains a large amount of methane. At
the Christies Beach plant it is used to heat the digesting sludge to maintain the efficiency
of the process. Elsewhere the gas fuel is used to generate electricity, with the waste heat
used to maintain the digestion process. This electricity is used in the plant, reducing our
use of non-renewable energy sources.

Once the micro-organisms have done their work water is removed from the digested
sludge through mechanical means such as centrifuging, or by natural solar evaporation in
lagoons.

The liquid remaining at the end of the process is usually pumped back into the aeration
tanks for further treatment.

The stable, solid material remaining, or biosolids, looks, feels and smells like damp earth
and makes ideal conditioner for soil.
Biological wastewater treatment, in its simplest form, is the conversion of biodegradable waste products
from municipal or industrial sources by biological means

CSTR
 Because the compositions of mixtures leaving a CSTR are those within the reactor, the reaction
driving forces, usually the reactant concentrations, are necessarily low.
 Therefore, except for reaction orders zero- and negative, a CSTR requires the largest volume of the
reactor types to obtain desired conversions.
 When high conversions of reactants are needed, several CSTRs in series can be used. Equally good
results can be obtained by dividing a single vessel into compartments while minimizing back-mixing
and short-circuiting.
 The CSTR configuration is widely used in industrial applications and in wastewater treatment units
(i.e. activated sludge reactors).

PFR
 Fluid going through a PFR may be modeled as flowing through the reactor as a series of infinitely
thin coherent "plugs", each with a uniform composition, traveling in the axial direction of the reactor,
with each plug having a different composition from the ones before and after it.
 The assumption: the fluid is perfectly mixed in the radial direction but not in the axial direction
(forwards or backwards). Each plug of differential volume is considered as a separate entity,
effectively an infinitesimally small continuous stirred tank reactor, limiting to zero volume.
 In the ideal tubular reactor, the fluids flow as if they were solid plugs or pistons, and reaction time is
the same for all flowing material at any given tube cross section.
 Disadvantages of plug flow reactors are that temperatures are hard to control and can result in
undesirable temperature gradients. PFR maintenance is also more expensive than CSTR maintenance.

Well-stirred batch reactors

 The stirred tank batch reactor is still the most widely used reactor type both in the laboratory and
industry. A batch reactor is one in which a feed material is treated as a whole for a fixed period of
time.
 Batch reactors may be preferred for small-scale production of high priced products, particularly if
many sequential operations are employed to obtain high product yields.
 Batch reactors also may be justified when multiple, low volume products are produced in the same
equipment or when continuous flow is difficult, as it is with highly viscous or sticky solids-laden
liquids.
 Because residence time can be more uniform in batch reactors, better yields and higher selectivity
may be obtained than with continuous reactors.
 Batch reactors often are used because of their suitability and convenient use mainly in laboratory
experimentation.
 Almost all batch reactors are well stirred; thus, ideally, compositions are uniform throughout and
residence times of all contained reactants are constant
 Batch reactors are rarely used in municipal or industrial waste water treatment units, except of certain
cases such as pH adjustment of a stream (i.e. by addition of alkali to neutralize a batch) or for
chemical precipitation of dissolved metals (i.e. removal of metal ions by alkaline precipitation).

Fermentation is a metabolic process converting sugar to acids, gases and/or alcohol using yeast or
bacteria.

Alkalinity
The Alkalinity or the buffering capacity of a stream refers to how well it can neutralize acidic pollution
and resist changes in pH. Alkalinity measures the amount of alkaline compounds in the water, such as
carbonates, bicarbonates and hydroxides. These compounds are natural buffers that can remove excess
hydrogen, or H+, ions (1991, Streamkeeper's Field Guide: Watershed Inventory and Stream Monitoring
Methods) .
BOD
The Biological Oxygen Demand, or BOD, is the amount of oxygen consumed by bacteria in the
decomposition of organic material. It also includes the oxygen required for the oxidation of various
chemical in the water, such as sulfides, ferrous iron and ammonia. While a dissolved oxygen test tells you
how much oxygen is available, a BOD test tells you how much oxygen is being consumed.
BOD is determined by measuring the dissolved oxygen level in a freshly collected sample and comparing
it to the dissolved oxygen level in a sample that was collected at the same time but incubated under
specific conditions for a certain number of days. The difference in the oxygen readings between the two
samples in the BOD is recorded in units of mg/L.
Unpolluted, natural waters should have a BOD of 5 mg/L or less. Raw sewage may have BOD levels
ranging from 150 – 300 mg/L (1991, Streamkeeper's Field Guide: Watershed Inventory and Stream
Monitoring Methods).
BOD (Biochemical oxyen demand) - The amount of oxygen required by micro-organisms to degrade the
organic matter and can be calculated as BOD of diluted and Undiluted samples. The BOD values depends
on the dissolved organic matter in the waste water samples. More the organic matter more the demand of
oxygen by microbes to degrade it.
Whereas as COD (Chemical Oxygen Demnad) - In this process , Use of strong chemical agent (such as
potassium dichromate) is done to degrade both the organic as well as inorganic matter present in the
wastewater samples. Also, COD values are always higher than the BOD values. Because COD includes
both biodegradbale and non-biodegradable substances whereas BOD contains only bio-degradable.
CBOD
Carbonaceous biochemical oxygen demand, or CBOD, measures the amount of demand that is oxidized
by carbon. CBOD is a fraction of the BOD that excludes the nitrogenous oxygen demand by the addition
of nitrogen inhibitors during the analysis (19th Edition, Standard Methods, 1995).
COD
The chemical oxygen demand, or COD, is used as a measure of the oxygen equivalent of the organic
matter content of a sample that is susceptible to oxidation by a strong chemical oxidant. For samples from
a specific source, COD can be related empirically to BOD, organic carbon, or organic matter. The test is
useful for monitoring and control after correlation has been established.
Oxidation of most organic compounds is 95 to 100 percent of the theoretical value. Ammonia, present
either in the waste or liberated from nitrogen-containing organic matter, is not oxidized in the absence of
significant concentration of free chloride ions (19th Edition, Standard Methods, 1995).
Conductivity
Conductivity is a measure of how well water can pass an electrical current. It is an indirect measure of the
presence of inorganic dissolved solids such as chloride, nitrate, sulfate, phosphate, sodium, magnesium,
calcium, iron and aluminum. The presence of these substances increases the conductivity of a body of
water. Organic substances like oil, alcohol, and sugar do not conduct electricity very well, and thus have a
low conductivity in water.
Inorganic dissolved solids are essential ingredients for aquatic life. They regulate the flow of water in and
out of organisms’ cells and are building blocks of the molecules necessary for life. A high concentration
of dissolved solids, however, can cause water balance problems for aquatic organisms and decrease
dissolved oxygen levels (1991, Streamkeeper's Field Guide: Watershed Inventory and Stream Monitoring
Methods) .
Dissolved Oxygen
The amount of Dissolved Oxygen, or DO, in water is expressed as a concentration. A concentration is the
amount of in weight of a particular substance per a given volume of liquid. The DO concentration in a
stream is the mass of the oxygen gas present, in milligrams per liter of water. Milligrams per liter, or
mg/L, can also be expressed as parts per million, or ppm.
The concentration of dissolved oxygen in a stream is affected by many factors:
 Temperature: Oxygen is more easily dissolved in cold water.
 Altitude: Oxygen in more easily dissolved into water at low altitudes that at high altitudes.
 Dissolved or suspended solids: Oxygen is also more easily dissolved into water with low levels of
dissolved or suspended solids.

Hardness
Hardness is frequently used as an assessment of the quality of water supplies. The hardness of a water is
governed by the content of calcium and magnesium salts (temporary hardness), largely combined with
bicarbonate and carbonate and with sulfates, chlorides, and other anions of mineral acids (permanent
hardness) (Limnology, Wetzel, 1983) .

Langmuir
the following assumptions[4] are valid specifically for the simplest case: the adsorption of a single
adsorbate onto a series of equivalent sites on the surface of the solid.

1. The surface containing the adsorbing sites is perfectly flat plane with no corrugations (assume the
surface is homogeneous) .
2. The adsorbing gas adsorbs into an immobile state.

3. All sites are equivalent.

4. Each site can hold at most one molecule of A (mono-layer coverage only).

5. There are no interactions between adsorbate molecules on adjacent sites.

chemical kinetics, in which the rate of a reaction is measured. By making changes in the reaction
conditions and measuring the effect of the changes on the rate of reaction, we can infer what is going on
at the molecular level.

Chemical kinetics is the measurement of how quickly reactions occur.

A 2nd order reaction has the rate equation   because it involves two reactants, A and B. In
a pseudo-1st-order reaction, we can manipulate the initial concentrations of the reactants. One of the
reactants, A, for example, would have a significantly high concentration, while the other reactant,
B, would have a significantly low concentration. We can then assume that reactant A's concentration
remains constant during the reaction because its consumption is so small that the change in
concentration becomes negligible. Because of this assumption, we can multiply the reaction rate,  , with
the reactant with assumed constant concentration, A, to create a new rate constant   (  =  ). This

new rate constant,  , will be used in the new rate equation, , as the new rate constant so we can treat
the 2nd order reaction as a 1st order reaction.

The CSTR operates at the reactor outlet condition which is at low substrate concentration and therefore
low reaction rate. Such low concentrations can, however, be beneficial for the improvement of reaction
selectivity, for autocatalytic type reactions and for the reduction of chemical hazard.
After entry into the CSTR the substrates are immediately diluted from feed concentration CAo to effluent
concentration CA. Therefore, -rA is always on is lowest possible value. In the BR and in the PFR the
concentration is decreasing during reaction and the rates are always higher compared to the CSTR. The
CSTR is, however, better for an auto-catalytic reaction, e.g. growth of microorganisms.

What is the difference between Latent Heat and Specific Heat?

• Latent heat is the energy absorbed or released when a substance is undergoing a phase change.
Specific heat is the quantity of heat required to raise the temperature of one gram of a substance by one
degree Celsius (or one Kelvin) at a constant pressure.