This paper presents a new developed pneumatic mechanism for lime dosing system in water treatment application. Technically, a choke formation due to scaling problem in such existing water treatment system utilising pump as the transferring medium has caused the high cost of operation due to scheduling maintenance and replacement of pump tubing. In that sense, the pneumatic system will be a new advancement in replacing the transferring medium. In this work, the air regulator is used to control air pressure at several levels. At the same time, there is one valve that is installed to control the airflow the regulator (air compressor) to the pneumatic cylinder cartridge. The assessment is conducted for water with 10% of lime concentration on water sample 25 PPM as the standard lime concentration for water treatment plant as the domestic usage in Malaysia. The trend of dosing rate for the present novel lime dosage utilising a pneumatic system shows consistency of increment with the increment of applied air pressure during the dosing process.

This paper proposes a new pneumatic mechanism for lime dosage in water treatment application. Conventionally, current water treatment system technologies utilising pump system, which requires scheduling maintenance of operation to avoid choke problem due to scaling development. The choke formation depends on the lime dosage concentration, which will be based on the time of operations. Technically, the pneumatic system uses such a hydraulic mechanism consisting of fluid, especially liquid oil, to operate, requiring higher maintenance costs. Based on these arguments, this research investigates the potential of replacing the pump system with an air pneumatic system for water treatment. For that reason, this study proposed a new design of pneumatic mechanism as the alternative solution for pump system. Several analyses have been performed from fluid mechanics to study the water treatment plant flow rate that could be competitive with the conventional pump system.