Evaluating Drinking Water Quality and Plants Efficiency in Karbala- Iraq

The assessment of the drinking water treatment projects faces many difficulties because unsuitable technologies, the inefficiency equipment and lack of skills. Therefore, simple and efficient technologies are necessary to evaluate the daily performance of the plants. In this research, the efficiency of sedimentation and filtration basins for ten drinking projects within Karbala governorate from January to December of 2017 were calculated based on turbidity parameter. This parameter was adopted because it is the most important factor which gives adequate indication of physical, chemical and biological of water quality. Also, the most factors that affective on the turbidity removal such as: pH, Alkalinity, Calcium, Total Dissolved Solid, Sulphate, and Hardness were examined. The evaluation of plant unit’s performance showed that the surface flow rate andretention time were the most important factors on sedimentation tanks efficiency. For the filtration basin, uniformity coefficient and effective size were the most affected factors on the sand filter performance. The results also explained that the higher efficiency of average turbidity removal for sedimentation units was 76.4% for plant5, while the higher removal efficiency of plants of filtration units was 78.7% for plant6. generally, plant 6 was the best in treated water where the average removal efficiency was 94.5% The results have been treated statistically to determine the best polynomial regression models for both sedimentation and filtration tanks, it was found Plant10 has the best polynomial models for each sedimentation and filter where the coefficient of determination(R2) was 0.92 and 0.95 respectively. Finally, all plants use ancient techniques in water treatment and its need to update this technique.

Keywords:

water treatment , efficiency , performance , filter , sedimentation , plant