AccScience Publishing / AJWEP / Volume 18 / Issue 4 / DOI: 10.3233/AJW210052
RESEARCH ARTICLE

Analytical Modeling for Water Chemistry Changes  in River Bank Filtration Systems

Shaymaa Mustafa1 Mohamad Darwish2*
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1 UTM Centre for Industrial & Applied Mathematics, IbnuSina Institute for Scientific & Industrial Research Universiti Teknologi Malaysia, Johor Bahru, Malaysia
2 School of Civil Engineering, Faculty of Engineering, Universiti Teknologi Malaysia (UTM) 81310 Skudai, Johor, Malaysia
AJWEP 2021, 18(4), 125–133; https://doi.org/10.3233/AJW210052
Submitted: 28 June 2021 | Revised: 3 August 2021 | Accepted: 3 August 2021 | Published: 18 November 2021
© 2021 by the Author(s). This article is an open access article distributed under the terms and conditions of the Creative Commons Attribution -Noncommercial 4.0 International License (CC-by the license) ( https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/ )
Abstract

Riverbank filtration system is considered one of the economic and sustainable solutions to river water  pollution especially in tropical countries such as Malaysia. In this work, an analytical model is developed to  simulate the contaminant attenuation in riverbank filtration systems by using the separation of variables method.  The basic aim of the model is to understand the role of microbial activity that occurs in riverbed sediments on  reducing the concentration of the contaminant in the aquifer and changing the water characteristics. Graphically, it  is found that the model can simulate the infiltration process of polluted river water effectively. Also, the analytical  model results, as well as experimental data, show that nitrate (18.6 and 34.1 mg-NO3/L) and sulphate (20.9 – 22.1  mg-SO4/L) can be consumed by bacteria in the first 0.5 m of the aquifer, and reduced by more than 95% for both  compounds. The model is applied for the first riverbank filtration system in Malaysia. Sensitivity analysis results  highlight the importance of dissolved organic matter (DOM) concentration (ranged from 1.0 to 12.4 mg/L) for  RBF efficacy in which a higher concentration of DOM leads to faster consumption of pollutants.

Keywords
Analytical modelling
riverbank filtration
ammonia pollution
bacterial process
wastewater.
Conflict of interest
The authors declare they have no competing interests.
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Asian Journal of Water, Environment and Pollution, Electronic ISSN: 1875-8568 Print ISSN: 0972-9860, Published by AccScience Publishing