Design, Construction and Evaluation of Charcoal, Activated Carbon, Moringa Seed and Sand Water Filtration Systems
Thesis
The majority of human population especially in developing countries suffers from water-borne diseases such as skin abscesses, cellulitis, skin infections, and diarrhoea due to improperly treated water. Safe drinking water remains unavailable to a large portion of the global population and this is a global concern. This work focused on the design, construction and evaluation of charcoal, activated carbon, Moringa seed and sand water filtration systems with an objective of evaluating the performance of the filters using flow rate and water quality parameters and also compare the cost and the performance of the filters with an existing commercial imported filter. The filtration method was adopted for this work. Four different filters were designed using different materials (sand, charcoal, activated carbon and pulverized Moringa seeds) were used because of the cost and destruction of a large number of microbial especially bacteria, pathogens, etc. Some water quality test such as the potential of Hydrogen (pH), Electrical Conductivity (EC), Turbidity, Dissolved Oxygen (DO), Total Dissolve Solid (TDS) and flow rates were carried out. The results shows that sand filter has the best flow rate of 3.80mL/sec. followed by charcoal (1.91mL/sec), activated carbon (1.73mL/sec) then Moringa (0.51 mL/sec), in terms of turbidity Moringa is the best with the value of 11.8 NTU and sand is the worst with 33.6NTU and Moringa is still the best in terms of EC and activated carbon is the worst with the value of 270 μS/cm and 315 μS/cm respectively.