Do you know what the steps of water treatment are? In order for this input to reach homes and industries in ideal conditions to be used, it first undergoes several cleaning processes that guarantee its healthiness.
It is very important that companies and municipal managers ensure that this resource undergoes all the necessary procedures for its filtration and disinfection. This is because, often, the water collected from rivers, wells and other sources may contain dirt, viruses and other dangerous contaminants with the potential to cause various diseases to the people who will consume it.
Read on and see how this treatment process works.
Before talking about the care steps for this input, it is important that you are clear about what is considered treated water.
This resource is understood this way when it passes through some type of treatment plant, which is the place where some necessary processes are carried out to combat impurities and contamination elements, such as viruses, bacteria and pollutants, which can harm human health.
You already know what treated water is, but where does it go through these care steps? All procedures performed to eliminate contaminating elements from this resource take place at a Water Treatment Plant (ETA).
ETAs have the necessary equipment to capture and clean this input, ensuring that it meets drinking standards for human consumption, that is, that the water is drinkable.
To be considered like this, this liquid needs:
The responsibility to provide quality water to people is enormous, since it is an essential resource for human survival, in addition to being the basis of various social activities, being, for example, indispensable for the functioning of various sectors of the industry - textile, refrigeration, oil, dairy, among others.
The time has come to learn about some of the main stages of water treatment. They are:
Do you know where the water you consume at home or work comes from? This resource is taken from rivers, streams, lakes, and underground freshwater sources and sent to stations that will carry out its treatment.
Thus, the first phase of care is precisely the raising of funds. At this time, the water is sent to a grid system that helps remove some larger dirt, such as tree branches and even human waste.
After being captured, the water passes through adduction. In this phase, the resource is sent to the Water Treatment Plants by means of pumps.
In this third stage of water treatment, some coagulating substances are added to the water that will help remove some very small and low-density dirt, that is, which are too light to be removed by sedimentation and, therefore, are suspended in the water.
The addition of a coagulant serves, in this case, precisely to make these particles heavier, making them easier to remove.
After the coagulant is added to the water, these small dirt clings to each other, forming larger flakes. Hence the name “flocculation”.
From this, these impurity blocks become heavier and end up sinking.
The suspended dirt that gathered and formed heavier flakes in the previous water treatment steps, now, in the decanting phase, ends up sinking and settling at the bottom of the tanks.
This is how they can be separated from the rest of the liquid. All those impurities that have sunk will form a kind of “slime”, which must then be discarded.
To ensure that no flake of dirt that, by chance, has not been decanted goes to the following steps, the water must pass through a layer of filters, which are made up of the following components:
This filtration scheme serves to remove all debris that has escaped the decantation.
In addition to eliminating all solid impurities, to be suitable for human consumption, this resource also needs to be within an adequate acidity range.
For this reason, there is the post-alkalization water treatment stage, which serves to correct the pH (hydrogenonic potential), which is the measurement unit that precisely defines how acidic or not that liquid is.
After having its pH adjusted, the water still needs to undergo a disinfection process to eliminate bacteria, viruses, and other microorganisms and toxins that can harm human health. At this stage of water treatment, it is common to use substances such as chlorine or ozone.
To conclude the water treatment stages, this resource involves fluoridation. Here fluoride is added to the liquid, a substance that helps prevent dental caries in the population.
So, did you like to learn about all the care phases necessary to prepare this input so important for human life? These phases apply, as already mentioned, to water collected from springs that will serve to supply homes and businesses in a city, for example.
But do you know what happens to the water used in factories and how it should be disposed of? Continue to the Projesan blog and understand what industrial effluents are and how to treat them.
