Journals Proceedings

Abstract

The swine farm effluent that is released into the environment, contained high nutrients concentrations such as nitrogen and phosphorus. This research studies the efficiency of swine farm effluent treatment using a laboratory-scale continuous reactor without alkali and Mg2+ addition to promote struvite precipitation and crystallization processes. The study investigates the effect of aeration rate and hydraulic retention time (HRT) on struvite crystallization. The swine farm effluent pH is increased due to CO2 stripping processes by added air in the reactor. The struvite formation was determined by SEM, SEM-EDS and XRD. The result shows that solution pH was increased with increasing aeration rate. At the 23 hours HRT experiment, the equilibrium solution pH was 8.43, 8.56, 8.71, 8.98 and 9.41, respectively. The efficiency of phosphorus removal was 64 – 69 percent and nitrogen removal was 36 – 74 percent. The struvite precipitated was found when effluent pH was 8.5 – 9.0.