Drinking water treatment by alum coagulation : competition among fluoride, natural organic matter, and aluminum

Some community water systems using sources containing elevated levels of fluoride, in the United States and worldwide, struggle to treat their drinking water to healthy fluoride concentrations. Many treatment plants in the U.S. currently use aluminum based salts, such as aluminum sulfate and polyaluminium chloride, as coagulants during conventional treatment for removal of particles from drinking water sources. Moreover, enhanced aluminum sulfate, or alum, coagulation requires higher concentrations of aluminum added to the process and has been shown to be effective for removal of disinfectant byproduct precursors, i.e., natural organic matter (NOM). The presence of fluoride may interfere with the formation of aluminum hydroxide precipitates, and interrelationships among NOM, aluminum precipitation and fluoride removal are not well understood. A fundamental understanding of how fluoride alters the properties of aluminum precipitates and how fluoride and NOM molecules compete as ligands interacting with soluble aluminum species is lacking. As a result, the development of guidelines for implementation and optimization of a treatment scheme that uses aluminum in the presence of fluoride requires a multi-faceted approach in which the development of a mechanistic understanding of these interactions is conducted in concert with macroscopic experiments to identify optimum conditions for simultaneous removal of fluoride and NOM. To date, little research has looked at the efficiency of removing both fluoride and organics from the perspective of the precipitation process. To provide a foundation for revising treatment techniques, this research evaluated the effect of co-precipitating aluminum in the presence of fluoride, organics, and in multi-ligand systems to characterize the solid precipitate and removal competition. This research verified the formation of a co-precipitate in the presence of fluoride and certain low molecular weight organics. Co-precipitation from organics and fluoride competes for removal, especially at low alum coagulant doses, complicating treatment for resource limited areas.