Natural Clay Supported Zerovalent Iron Nanoparticles as a Potential Coagulant for Ammonia Reduction from Industrial Wastewater Effluents

Abstract

Water pollution is one of the largest environment problems in several countries. It mainly arises from wastewater released from household, industrial and agricultural processes. These effluents typically contain high concentrations of organic and inorganic chemicals such as hydrocarbon solvents, heavy metals, pesticides, dyes and so on. The toxicity, persistency and concentration of the contaminants result in serious environmental, public health and economic impacts [5]. Consequently, treatment of wastewater effluents before release into the environment is required. There are several wastewater treatment techniques including physical, chemical or biological processes i.e. coagulation, flocculation, adsorption, reverse osmosis, activated sludge and so on, which are used to remove pollutants from wastewater influents. Nevertheless, these conventional techniques have shown limitations, for the removal of ammonia. Use of activated clay, is one of the most promising techniques because the natural clay is of low-cost, is easy to obtain, and has good effectiveness and ability of degrading contaminants due to its adsorptive properties enhanced by sulphuric acid, which will supply charges to break the stability of ammonia in water by attracting them at the coagulant surface, then the activated clay will secondly be supported by zero valent iron nanoparticles in a homogenous mixture to increase the surface area on which the adsorption of pollutants will effectively take place [6,7,8]. Ion exchange and reverse osmosis have failed to destroy efficiently nitrate species and regenerate secondary brine wastes; electro-catalytic process necessitates higher potential to reduce nitrate into nitrogen. Basically, according to samples that were collected from several Wastewater plants in Cape Town, for instance, here below is the concentration trend of ammonia from the current WWTPs (red) comparatively to the standards (blue) (Figure 1). *Corresponding author: Wighens I Ngoie, Department of Chemical Engineering, Biocatalysis & Technical Biology Research Group, Cape Peninsula University of Technology, Bellville Campus, South Africa. Received Date: November 09, 2018 Published Date: June 10, 2019 ISSN: 2692-5397 DOI: 10.33552/MCMS.2020.01.000512