Removal of organic matter and nutrients from a porcine effluent, through geo-containment filtration

Abstract

The intensive porcine productions generate effluents with high contents of solids, organic matter, phosphorus and nitrogen; constituting a source of contamination when they are not treated accordingly. Geocontainment filtration is a technology that allows to retain solids and thereby reduce the concentration of organic matter and nutrients in liquid effluents. The objective of the work was to evaluate the removal of the solid fraction of porcine effluents, through a filtration with addition of coagulants (FeCl3) and flocculants (cationic polymer).A filtering device was used to simulate the real load conditions in geocontainers: turbulence, flow and pressure. Three treatments were performed with 3 replicas: untreated raw effluent (T0), filtered effluent without the addition of chemicals (T1), filtered effluent with addition of chemicals (T2), filtered effluent with 20% more chemicals than T2 (T3). The physical effluent and each of the treatments were used to perform physical, microbiological and parasitological determinations by reference methods, in order to evaluate the removal percentages of each one. Data were analyzed by the Prism 5 program, through a one-way ANOVA and the Bonferroni test was used to perform multiple comparison tests between treatments. The statistical analysis showed that there were significant differences (p <0.05) between the treatments T0 and T2 / T3 in the following parameters: pH, chemical oxygen demand (COD), total phosphorus (PT), electrical conductivity (CE), nitrogen total (NT), total solids (ST), total suspended solids (SST), for soluble ions Ca, Cu, Mn, Mg, and for total ions Zn and Cu.T2 and T3 treatments achieved a removal in most of the parameters analyzed, demonstrating that geocontainment with the addition of coagulant and flocculant is a technology that can be used to retain solids and nutrients from a porcine effluent.