TREATMENT OF WATER FROM BORE HOLE USING MORINGA OLEIFERA SEED AND COMMERCIAL ACTIVATED CARBON
ABSTRACT
The quality and accessibility of drinking water are of paramount importance to human health. Drinking water may contain disease causing agents and toxic chemicals and to control the risks to public health, systematic water quality monitoring and surveillance are required. Thousands of chemicals have been identified in drinking water supplies around the world and are considered potentially hazardous to human health at relatively high concentrations. Heavy metals are the most harmful of the chemical pollutants and are of particular concern due to their toxicities to humans. Moringa oleifera seed acts as a natural coagulant, adsorbent and antimicrobial agent while commercial activated carbon is known for its excellent heavy metal removal. It is believed that Moringa oleifera seed is an organic natural polymer. The coagulation mechanism of the Moringa oleifera coagulant protein has been described as adsorption, charge neutralization and interparticle bridging. It is mainly characteristic of high molecular weight polyelectrolyte. Analysis of the heavy metals Lead, Nickel, Iron, and zinc were performed before and after treatment of water with Moringa oleifera seed coagulant, CAC and the mixture of both. The results showed that Moringa oleifera seeds and CAC were capable of adsorbing the heavy metals tested in some water samples. The optimum dosage of Moringa oleifera seed powder for water sample was 4g/L which gave 100%, and 88% removal efficiencies of Pb and Ni respectively, while the optimum dosage of CAC for water sample was 6g/L which gave 100%, 100% and 92% removal efficiencies of Pb, Zn and Ni respectively. Also the optimum dosage of mixture of Moringa oleifera seed powder and commercial activated for water sample was 4g/L which gave 100%, and 86% removal efficiencies of Pb and Ni respectively. Fitting in of Langmuir isotherm and Freundlich shows that Langmuir fits in more than Freundlich. Also it was verified in this work that Moringa oleifera serves as an antimicrobial agent as it reduced the colonies to Zero on the dosage of 6g/L.
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