A 1,000 m3/d DAF(dissolved air flotation) pilot plant was installed to evaluate the performance of the floating process using the Nakdong River. Efficiency of various DAF operations under different conditions, such as hydraulic loading rate, coagulant concentration was evaluated in the current research. The operation conditions were evaluated, based on the removal or turbidity, TOC(total organic carbon), THMFP(trihalomethane formation potential), Mn(manganese), and Al(aluminum). Also, particle size analysis of treated water by DAF was performed to examine the characteristics of particles existing in the treated water. The turbidity removal was higher than 90%, and it could be operated at 0.5 NTU or less, which is suitable for the drinking water quality standard. Turbidity, TOC, and THMFP resulted in stable water quality when replacing the coagulant from alum to PAC(poly aluminum chloride). A 100% removal of Chl-a was recorded during the summer period of the DAF operations. Mn removal was not as effective as where the removal did not satisfy the water quality standards for the majority of the operation period. Hydraulic loading of 10 m/h, and coagulant concentrations of 40 mg/L was determined to be the optimal operating conditions for turbidity and TOC removal. When the coagulant concentration increases, the Al concentration of the DAF treated water also increases, so coagulant injection control is required according to the raw water quality. Particle size distribution results indicated that particles larger than 25 μm showed higher removal rates than smaller particles. The total particel count in the treated water was 2,214.7 counts/ml under the operation conditions of 10 m/h of hydraulic loading rate and coagulant concentrations of 60 mg/L.

Large amounts of oily wastewater discharged from various industrial operations (petroleum refining, machinery industries and chemical industries) cause serious pollution in the aquatic environment. Although dissolved air flotation (DAF) separating oil pollutants using microbubbles represents current practice, bubble size cannot be selectively controlled, and lots of power is required to generate microbubbles. Therefore, to investigate performance of the DAF process, this study examined the distribution of different sizes of microbubbles resulting from changes in physical shear force via modifying shapes of a slit-nozzle without an additional power supply. Three types of slit-nozzles (different angle, shape and length of the slit-nozzle) were used to analyze the distribution of bubble size. At a slit angle of 60°, shear force was 4.29 times higher than a conventional slit, and particle size distribution (PSD) in the range between 2 and 20 μm more than doubled. Treatment efficiency of synthetic oily wastewater through the coagulation-DAF process achieved 90% removal of COD by injecting FeCl3 and PACl of 250 mg/L and 100 mg/L, respectively, and the same performance resulted using FeCl3 of 200 mg/L and PACl of 80 mg/L employing a slit-nozzle angle of 60°. This study shows that a coagulation-DAF process using a modified slit-nozzle can improve the pre-treatment of oily wastewater.

In this study, we divided the process operation scenarios into three categories based on raw water temperature and turbidity. We will select and operate the process operation scenario according to the characteristics of the raw water. The number of algae in the DAF treated water has been analyzed to be less than 100 cells/mL. These results indicated that the DAF process is effective in removing the algae. In addition, the scenario of the integrated management decision algorithm of the DAF process was developed. DAF pilot plants (500 m3/day) process has shown a constantly sound performance for the treatment of raw water, yielding a significantly low level of turbidity (DAF treated water, 0.21~1.56 NTU).