New method of producing a more efficient coagulant for the treatment of water from seeds of moringa oleifera

The coagulation is essential in raw water treatment. The most used coagulants are often of chem-ical origin and expensive and their use generates non-biodegradable residues. This is why inno-vative studies on the synthesis of natural coagulants based on plant extracts are very important. This study presents a new method of producing a coagulant for the treatment of water from seeds of moringa oleifera. The application of the new method is done in several steps: Harvesting moringa oleifera seeds, shelling, crushing the seeds, extracting oil from moringa oleifera powder, extracting salts from powder from moringa seeds oleifera, microfiltration with a 0.2 mu m filter and lyophilization which gives the final product in dry form. We used the resulting product for coag-ulation of lake water with an initial turbidity of 40 NTU. This treatment reduced the turbidity of the water by almost 95 % when we used 0.7 mg of this coagulant per liter of water. Moringa has previously been used to produce coagulant but the peculiarity of this study is that it takes a very small amount of the synthesized product to effectively treat water. The results of this research work have shown that the coagulant produced rom the seeds of Moringa oleifera can be used effectively for the treatment of surface water. The residual turbidity obtained after the treatment of lake water with the coagulant produced was in accordance with the drinking water standard according to the World Health Organi-zation (WHO) (less than 5 NTU). The coagulant produced by this new method from moringa oleifera seed is an alternative to aluminum sulfate coagulant for water treatment.