Harvesting The Nutrients From Fish Farm Effluent Via Ultrafiltration Process As Foliar Spray

• Main Author: Zol, Nur Adlin Mohd
• Format: Monograph
• Language: English
• Published: Universiti Sains Malaysia 2022
• Subjects: T Technology; TP155-156 Chemical engineering
• Online Access: http://eprints.usm.my/55554/1/Harvesting%20The%20Nutrients%20From%20Fish%20Farm%20Effluent%20Via%20Ultrafiltration%20Process%20As%20Foliar%20Spray.pdf; http://eprints.usm.my/55554/

A study was conducted to harvest the dissolved nutrient and remove suspended solid and microalgae from the fish farm effluent using ultrafiltration membrane and to evaluate the efficiency of the harvested nutrient for hydroponic liquid fertilizer via foliar spray. In the first part, two types of ultrafiltration membrane with different molecular weight cut off (WMCO) namely ST membrane (10kDa) and MK membrane (30kDa) were evaluated for its separation efficiencies. Results revealed that the pore size of UF membrane does not conform a higher permeation flux due to its difference in surface energy. The flux of ST membrane was 79.173 L/m2.h while the MK membrane with bigger pore only recorded flux of 4.228 L/m2.h. Pretreament using copper mesh with 500 mesh size could separate microalgae and total suspended solid without altering the nutrient content in fish effluent. The fouling conditions of the membrane were studied via flux declination and the surface were examined using Scanning Electron Microscopes (SEM), Energy Dispersive X-Ray Analysis (EDX) and Fourier-transform infrared spectroscopy (FTIR). It was found that ST membrane took approximately 3 hours for the permeate flux to start decreasing from the highest permeate flux at 100.12 L/m2.h to 85.39 L/m2.h at 9.9 hour. Next, this study shows that the treated fish effluent as foliar spray has a great benefit to the plant in term of plant height, number of leaves and fresh weight. The liquid fertilizer after copper mesh prefiltration and UF process has longer shelf live with no significant microalgae blooming after storing for 15 days.