Competitive removal of hardness and turbidity from raw water for drinking purpose by Moringa Oleifera seed

Abstract

The objective of this study was to clarify the competitive removal of hardness and background turbidity in raw water for drinking purpose by Moringa Oleifera (MO). Raw water containing high concentration of hardness from Timah Tasoh Dam (Perlis, Malaysia) and synthetic water (turbid, hard, turbid and hard) were used in this research. The optimum turbidity and hardness removal were attained at low MO dosage (5–50 mg/L). Both turbidity and hardness had certain effect on the optimum MO dose attained. The hardness tends to enhance the turbidity removal where the optimum point was achieved at lower MO dose, while the turbidity will caused more MO required for optimum removal of hardness. The maximum percentage of turbidity and hardness removal were 94 %, and 60 %, respectively. In Langmuir Model, the adsorption capacities obtained were 2.89, 1.73 and 11.16 for synthetic hard water without and with turbidity and Timah Tasoh raw water. For Freundlich Model, the adsorption capacities obtained were 1136.60, 1.26 x 10 -3 and 0.07 for synthetic hard water without and with turbidity and Timah Tasoh raw water. This result implies that Langmuir Model is more suitable to study the adsorption capacity of MO in softening water.