An investigative study on the use of dragon fruit foliage as natural coagulant to treat wastewater from electrical cable manufacturing plant / Nor Solehah Mohamad Zaid

The potential of the dragon fruit foliage (DFF) as bio-coagulant to treat wastewater from electrical cable factory was investigated. Dragon fruit foliage represents as a part of the overall dragon fruit plant system. The study used a Jar test experiment to investigate the three main parameters which were chemical oxygen demand (COD), suspended solids (SS), and turbidity in copper electrical cable industry wastewater. The experiment was performed by varying the pH, with fixed dosage of coagulant to find optimum pH and varying the dosage of coagulant with fixed pH to find optimum dosage of coagulant. The highest recorded percentage removals of COD, SS and turbidity observed for optimum pH 2 and optimum dosage at 100 were mg/L 94.53, 89.413 and 88.59%, respectively. It is proven that dragon fruit foliage has tremendous potential in treating copper electrical cable wastewater. Therefore, the dragon fruit foliage can be used in the wastewater treatment of Malaysian electrical cable manufacture industry.