Water Treatment by Fabric Capillary Action: New Technique from Ancient Origins

摘要

The wick filtration or the capillary syphoning has been employed by the ancientEgyptians for the water treatment as illustrated in engravings in the tomb ofAmenophis Ⅱ in Egypt. A distinction was made between the capillary syphoning,called ‘tube distillation', and straining, called ‘distillation by straining' where waterwas transmitted from a bottle to another by those actions. Recently, the ancienttechnique has been developed by transmitting the water from a channel to anotherthrough technical nonwoven fabrics employing the fabric capillary action. Followingextensive research in the laboratory, a pilot plant has been constructed for fieldevaluation. The results showed that the new method is capable of removing turbidity,algae, and bacteria with removal efficiencies up to 93, 98, and 97% respectively. Theeffluent turbidity was less than 0.9 NTU, the algal count was 0.12×10~4 count/ml, andthe bacterial count was 0.25×10~3 count/100 ml in the treated water. On the other hand,the cleaning of fabrics has been studied and it was found that the pressurizedchlorinated water can efficiently clean the fabrics without affecting the treatmentefficiency. Moreover, a side by side comparison has been conducted between thedeveloped technique and the slow sand filtration system as a low cost technologycounterpart. The comparative study revealed that the developed technique is lowerthan the slow sand filtration in terms of capital, operational and maintenance costs.