Treatment of Al Doura Oil Refinery Wastewater Turbidity using Magnetic Flocculation

Abstract

The use of conventional flocculants such as Aluminum sulphate (Alum) alone to treat the wastewater may be insufficient to get the required turbidity, suspended solids removal. It also requires relatively a long residence time. Magnetic flocculation is one of the techniques used for increasing the efficiency of the turbidity removal. In the present study, three sets of experiments are carried out in order to investigate the possibility of increasing the suspended solid removal efficiency from Al Doura oil refinery wastewater using iron oxide (Fe3O4), Nickel (Ni), and Cobalt (Co) ferromagnetic powders with alum. The following operating conditions namely, pH, alum dose, ferromagnetic powder dose, and initial turbidity are studied. The results revealed that an improvement in turbidity removal efficiency is satisfied, as well as, a reasonable reduction in the sedimentation period is achieved. The highest turbidity removal is 99.88% that obtained for 122NTU sample for alum dose 120 mg/L+ Nickel dose of 80mg/L and pH of 6.5.