Organic and inorganic flocculants are used in treatment of water and industrial effluents. Polymeric flocculants, synthetic as well as natural, because of their natural inertness to PH changes, low dosage, and easy handling, have become very popular in industrial effluent treatment. It has been established in the authors' laboratory that by grafting polyacrylamide branches on rigid backbone of polysaccharides, the dangling grafted chains have easy approachability to contaminants in effluents. Thus grafted polysaccharides are very efficient, shear stable and biodegradable flocculants. They also exhibit turbulent drag reducing characteristics. Among grafted guar gum, xanthan gum, carboxymethyl cellulose, and starch, grafted starch performs the best. Starch consists of amylose (a low molecular weight linear polymer) and amylopectin (a high molecular weight, branched polymer). The grafted amylopectin is found to be the best flocculant for various kinds of industrial effluents, providing credibility to the above‐cited model. In the present paper, the details about grafted polysaccharides as turbulent drag reducers and flocculants are given, along with their applications.

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ABSTRACT:The article deals with the synthesis of two polysaccharide-based graft copolymers of acrylamide, namely, starch-g-polyacrylamide (St-g-PAM) and amylopecting-polyacrylamide (Ap-g-PAM). Intrinsic viscosity of the graft copolymers was determined. A flocculation jar test was carried out with Ϫ200# ASTM particles for two coking and two noncoking coal samples from Indian coalfields. It is observed that both the grafted products are very effective flocculants in bringing down the turbidity of supernatant liquid of coking coal fines suspension. Though they are effective flocculants in the case of noncoking coal suspension as well, the supernatant turbidity remains somewhat high. Ap-g-PAM performed better than St-g-PAM, which is distinctly apparent in the case of noncoking coal suspension. This may be ascribed to the presence of longer grafted polyacrylamide chains in case of Ap-g-PAM.

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