Pre-Treatment of Water by using Broken Marble and Ceramic Wastes as Up-Flow Roughing Filter Media

Abstract

The main objective of this study is to develop simple, inexpensive, efficient and chemical-free alternative pretreatment
process for water by using of up-flow roughing filter system. The raw water that used in present study was
synthetic raw water. The turbid water obtained by adding kaolinite dose at specific concentration to achieve a
turbidity from 20 to 418 NTU. The pilot plant unit was made from low-cost , locally and available materials. It consist
of two steel filter columns with 1.5 m height and 30 cm in diameter. The marble media was installed in URFL.1 while
the ceramic media was installed in URFL.2. The two filters was investigated with three filtration rates of 1, 0.75 and
0.5 m/h. The main aim of experimental work was to reduce the turbidity bellow 20 NTU that’s acceptable to slow
sand filter operation. The best performance filter was URFL.2 of ceramic media at filtration rate of 0.5 m/h. Where
the URFL.2 could reduce the turbidity bellow of 109 NTU to value less than 20 NTU that’s acceptable to slow sand
filter operation.