No abstract

Nowadays, the growing population is demanding freshwater resources, and the availability of water influence the population distribution and its activities. Groundwater sources such as springs and wells are the major source of water for drinking, agricultural, and industrial consumptions. However, water resources are always exposed to industrial, agricultural, and residential pollutions. In the current study, water samples were collected from twenty-two springs sources from February to October 2017 in Amadiya districts, in the Kurdistan region of Iraq. The physicochemical characteristics including temperature, pH, dissolved oxygen (DO), biological oxygen demand (BOD5), electrical conductivity (EC), total dissolved solids (TDS), total hardness (TH), calcium hardness (Ca2), magnesium hardness (Mg2), turbidity (NTU), total alkalinity (TA), and nitrate (NO3 -) of the samples were analyzed. The findings showed that most of the water samples were within the permissible limits for drinking usage according to WHO (World Health Organization) standards, while few samples were without the permissible level for TDS and EC. Also, higher concentrations of TDS and EC reported for some samples attributed to agricultural and residential contamination, which require water treatment for drinking purposes. The statistical analysis illustrated an acceptable correlation between analysis.

The objective of this study is the characterization of activated carbon prepared from hawthorn core natural residue which is a vegetation waste. By using zinc chloride (ZnCl2) as a chemical agent 40 %  for 25 hours at (25 °C) as a raw material in this work. The best conditions were determined to be a carbonization temperature of 400 °C for 1 hour and a maximum yield is 82 %   Different operational factors such as carbonization time and temperature were used to prepare activated carbon from hawthorn core stones, pH, ash content, density, humidity content, conductivity, iodine number, and methylene blue dye absorption were all investigated in the generated activated carbon. Characterization of the activated carbon obtained was performed by using scanning electron microscopy (SEM), X-ray diffraction (XRD) and energy dispersive X-ray (EDX). Finally, the activated carbon synthesized in this study has acquired good properties that enable it to play an important function in a variety of environmental applications, including eco-protection, water treatment, and wastewater treatment and it was compared to a commercial reference sample from the B. D. H Company in industrial applications.