DEVELOPEMENT THE PERFORMANCE OF CERAMIC CANDLE FILTERS FOR WATER PURIFICATION USING LOCALLY MATERIALS

Abstract

This research presents an investigation on the technical feasibility of design and manufacturing the ceramic water candle filters made from Iraqi raw materials to improve the domestic water quality to standards suitable for human consumption in villages and country side, the performance assessment is based on its porosity, turbidity reduction, bacteria removal, ease of flow, hardness and undesired ions reduction, so number of experiments were done by mixing different percent of the raw materials of which activated kaolin clay 15 to 45 wt%,coal 15 to 40 wt%, and porcelanite 15 to 40 wt%, with same grain sizes less than 75 microns. All of these mixtures were molded under constant firing temperature and hydraulic compression pressure (1200 0C, and 1325 kg/cm2). The effect of different feed percent for each material gave the optimum percent of 25%wt activated kaolin clay, 35%wt coal, 40%wt porcelanite reaching to the better tests results, number of tests also is made over the experiments range such as apparent density, porosity, wettability, turbidity, TDS, E Coli, water ions examination tests, the produced filter porosity was 62.3%, water turbidity reduced from 167 NTU to less than 5 NTU.