Ground Water Filtration by Natural Zeolit to Reduce Iron and Manganese Levels

Ground Water Filtration by Natural Zeolit to Reduce Iron and Manganese Levels. In rural areas most people use ground water for their daily purposes. Frequently, the water has high levels of Fe dan Mn. To provide a simple, cheap and reliable apparatus to reduce Fe and Mn, a zeolit column has been designed for filtering ground water. The objective of this experiment was to establish the optimal condition of the filtration. Natural zeolit of Bayah origin was crushed and grounded into small particles of approximately 3 mm in diameter. After washed with distilled water and dried in open air, the particles were then packed in a 4 × 50-cm glass column. The zeolit column was installed vertically, watered with distilled water to compact, and dried. Then 500 mL of ground water sample was poured onto the prepared zeolit column. By adjusting the stopcock, the water samples were filtered off at a flowrate of 16 mL/min. Filtrateswere collected with interval of 30 minutes for 2.5 hours and subjected to Fe and Mn analysis. The experiment was repeated for filtration rates of 14, 12, 10, 8, 6, 4, and 2 mL/min. Fe and Mn concentrations, contact times, and flowrates were converted into scattered-plot graphs of contact times versus concentrations. The graphs show that the optimum condition for Fe and Mn removals were 30-minute contact time and 2-mL/minute flowrate. At this, the Bayah zeolit Fe was reduced for 55% but it was only 40% for Mn in ground water containing 3.6 mg/L Fe and 0.7 mg/L Mn. However, at the optimum condition water debit of the zeolit column was only 2.88 L/day. Quantitatively, with filtration rate of 2 mL/minute, up to 2.5 hours contact time the Fe was only reduced to as much 1.12 mg/L (standard: 1.0 mg/L) while the Mn reduced to nil. It was concluded that the Bayah zeolit was effective to reduce Fe and Mn in ground water, although reducing capacity for Mn was better than for Fe, whereas the column could not be applied for daily purposes due to its low water debit