In this study, the use of acorn leaves as a natural coagulant to reduce raw water turbidity and globally improve drinking water quality was investigated. The raw water was collected from a drinking water treatment plant located in Mila (Algeria) with an initial turbidity of 13.0 ± 0.1 NTU. To obtain acorn leaf powder as a coagulant, the acorn leaves were previously cleaned, washed with tap water, dried, ground and then finely sieved. To improve the coagulant activity and, consequently, the turbidity removal efficiency, the fine powder was also preliminarily treated with different solvents, as follows, in order to extract the coagulant agent: (i) distilled water; (ii) solutions of NaCl (0.25; 0.5 and 1 M); (iii) solutions of NaOH (0.025; 0.05 and 0.1 M); and (iv) solutions of HCl (0.025; 0.05 and 0.1 M). Standard Jar Test assays were conducted to evaluate the performance of the coagulant in the different considered operational conditions. Results of the study indicated that at low turbidity (e.g., 13.0 ± 0.1 NTU), the raw acorn leaf powder and those treated with distilled water (DW) were able to decrease the turbidity to 3.69 ± 0.06 and 1.97 ± 0.03 NTU, respectively. The use of sodium chloride solution (AC-NaCl) at 0.5 M resulted in a high turbidity removal efficiency (91.07%) compared to solutions with different concentrations (0.25 and 1 M). Concerning solutions of sodium hydroxide (AC-NaOH) and hydrogen chloride (AC-HCl), the lowest final turbidities of 1.83 ± 0.13 and 0.92 ± 0.02 NTU were obtained when the concentrations of the solutions were set at 0.05 and 0.1 M, respectively. Finally, in this study, other water quality parameters, such as total alkalinity hardness, pH, electrical conductivity and organic matters content, were measured to assess the coagulant performance on drinking water treatment.

The coagulation–flocculation–sedimentation process is widely used for removal of suspended solids and water turbidity reduction. The most common coagulants used to conduct this process are aluminum sulfate and ferric sulfate. In this paper, the use of Aloe vera as a natural-based coagulant for drinking water treatment was tested. The bio-coagulant was used in two different forms: powder as well as liquid; the latter was extracted with distilled water used as a solvent. The obtained results showed that the use of the natural coagulant (Aloe vera) in both powder (AV-Powder) and liquid (AV-H2O) forms reduced the water turbidity at natural pH by 28.23% and 87.84%, respectively. Moreover, it was found that the use of the two previous forms of bio-coagulant for drinking water treatment had no significant influence on the following three parameters: pH, alkalinity, and hardness. The study of the effect of pH on the process performance using Aloe vera as a bio-coagulant demonstrated that the maximum turbidity removal efficiency accounted for 53.53% and 88.23% using AV-Powder and AV-H2O, respectively, at optimal pH 6.

An enhanced and different method for the active coagulant agent extraction from Moringa Oleifera seeds powder (MOSP) was established and compared to the conventional extraction method in distillate water. In the improved method, MOSP were extracted using sodium chloride as solvent at different concentrations to extract more coagulant agent from Moringa Oleifera and enhance coagulation activity. In this study, MOSP were initially processed and oil content was removed to minimize coagulant concentration usage (MOSP-EO). Moringa Oleifera seeds powder was characterized by both X-ray and FTIR analysis. Ultrasound treatment as well was considered as an additional treatment for MOSP-EO to investigate its effect on coagulant agent extraction process improvement. Coagulation/flocculation experiments were conducted to assess coagulant extraction performance realized through various conditions. The effect of coagulant dosage, solvent concentration and ultrasound exposition duration were investigated for a real effluent of municipal wastewater treatment. Among the three studied NaCl concentrations, 1.0 M was found to be the best solvent concentration for high turbidity removal of more than 97% using 140 mg/L of MOSP-EO compared to extraction in distillate water 88% using 170 mg/L of the same coagulant. NaCl 1.0 M demonstrated the best performance in biochemical oxygen demand (BOD5) removal as well, where more than 98% of municipal wastewater initial BOD5 was eliminated. Mixing MOSP-EO assisted with ultrasound waves at different treatment periods did decrease the active coagulant agent extraction and thus showed its inconvenient for Moringa Oleifera coagulation activity usage.

The purpose of this work is the study the ability of the plant material Aloe vera to act as natural coagulant using raw water obtained from a drinking water treatment plant (Mila, Algeria). Different solvents such as: NaCl; NaOH and HCl were used as chemical activators to extract the active components from the Aloe vera plant, and different coagulation-flocculation experiments were conducted in a jar test apparatus to evaluate the performance of the extracted coagulant. Also, the effect of coagulant dose on some water parameters such as turbidity, pH, total alkalinity and organic matter were investigated. The results showed that the use of coagulants obtained by using different solvents increases the coagulation efficiency compared to the coagulant obtained from the raw material, for example the maximum turbidity removal efficiency was 28.23, 78.07, 83.46 and 85.15% when using powdered Aloe vera (raw material), AV-NaCl (0.5 M), AV-NaOH (0.05 M) and AV-HCl (0.05 M), respectively. The results defined, that the residual turbidity obtained in this work, where the Aloe vera was used (after treatment by solvents) produced a turbidity lower than the Algerian standard (5 NTU) with initial turbidity (13 NTU). In this study, the infrared spectrum study and analysis has revealed the presence of different functional groups, which are responsible for the coagulation process.