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Go to Editorial ManagerAl-Robat and Al-Jubyla creeks, which composes the study area, are two of the main six creeks branched from Shatt Al- Arab river in Basrah province, south of Iraq. They are used as open drains for discharging untreated sanitary sewage which caused the depletion of their dissolved oxygen and subsequently the deterioration of their water quality. To study the impact of discharging untreated sanitary sewage on study area water quality, measured in terms of dissolved oxygen concentration, it is necessary to determine the values of deoxygenation coefficient ( K 1 ). The aim of this study is to find K 1 values for the study area using laboratory results of BOD time series analyses. For this purpose, water samples were collected from eight locations distributed along the study area. Thomas graphical method was applied to calculate K 1 . The results showed that the K 1 values for Al-Robat and Al-Jubyla creeks ranged from 0.279 to 0.488 day ˗ 1 at 20 °C with ultimate BOD values varied over the range (40.5-258.6) mg/l. These results revealed that the water in Al-Robat and Al-Jubyla creeks has the characteristics of raw sewage.
Flocculation process is used to agglomerate colloids to form large and heavy flocs. It is accomplished using mechanical or hydraulic slow mixing. The hydraulic mixing is usually achieved using baffles. The aim of this study is to conduct experimental work to study the effect of baffles shape and configuration on baffled flocculator performance. The work includes 304 experiments conducted in a pilot plant of baffled flocculator. Two arrangements of three baffle shapes (blind baffles, baffles of rectangular slot and baffles of circular slots) were adopted. During each experiment, water turbidity and temperature, influent flow rate and head loss were measured. The main outcomes of this study are; (1) for all baffle types and arrangements, flocculation efficiency (FE) increases with the increase of velocity gradient (G) till it reaches a maximum value, then, it decreases and the G value which produces the maximum FE varies with detention time (t), (2) within the applied range of Gt values (10231-25304), the correlation between FE and Gt is weak to moderate positive and varied according to baffles type and arrangement, (3) within the applied range of initial water turbidity (IWT) values (18.1-196) NTU, the correlation between FE and IWT is weak positive to good positive represented by logarithmic relationship, and (4) within the implemented baffle types, the blind baffles type gives the highest FE values for all the baffles number as compared with the other baffle types. Also, the most frequent head loss coefficient values were obtained.
Fluidized bed reactor (FBR) is an attached growth system used mainly for biological treatment of industrial wastewater of high organic content. These wastewaters are usually resulted from refineries and milk, starch, and olive oil industries. The objective of this study is to investigate the use of fluidized bed reactor for treating sanitary sewage. The study was accomplished using a pilot plant of the FBR. The pilot plant was constructed and installed in Hamdan Sewage Treatment Plant in Basrah governorate. That was to maintain continuous source of settled sewage which is the influent to the FBR. The period of plant operation was nine weeks. During, this period, the plant was operated at three phases of different conditions (up flow velocity and recirculation ratio). To study the performance of FBR, the main measured parameters were; BOD, DO, VSS, pH, and temperature. The most important conclusions of this study are; (1) the maximum efficiency of BOD removal is 78.6% which was obtained for hydraulic retention time (HRT) of 24min and upflow velocity of 1.59m/min, (2) the effluent BOD values during phases-1 and 2 of plant operation match that of stabilization ponds and trickling filters and during phase-3 matches that activated sludge process, (3) during all operation phases, the values of effluent pH are within the limits specified in national standards of secondary effluents, (4) as F/M increases, the efficiency of BOD removal decreases and the maximum efficiency of BOD removal (78.6%) was obtained at F/M ratio equals 23.47 day -1 , and (5) the HRT of fluidized bed reactor is on order of minutes, while, the values of HRT of activated sludge systems and stabilization ponds are on order of hours and days, respectively.
Safwan-Zubair area is regarded as one of the important agricultural areas in Basrah province, South of Iraq. The aim of this study is to predict groundwater level in this area using ANNs model. The data required for building the ANNs model are generated using MODFLOW model (V.5.3). MODFLOW model was calibrated based on field measurements of groundwater level in 13 monitoring wells during a period of one year (Nov./2013 to Oct/2014). The neural network toolbox available in MATLAB version 7.1 (2010B) was used to develop the ANN models. Three layers feed-forward network with Log- sigmoid transfer function was used. The networks were trained using Levenberg-Marquradt back-propagation algorithm. The ANN modes are divided into two groups, each of four models. The input data of the first group include hydraulic heads, while, the input data of the second group include hydraulic heads and recharge rates. Based on results of this study it was found that; the best ANN model for predicting groundwater levels in the study area is obtained when the input data includes hydraulic heads and recharge rates of two successive months preceding the target month, the best structure of ANN model is of three layers feed-forward network type composes of two hidden layers, each of ten nodes, and the including of recharge rates as input data, beside the hydraulic heads has improved slightly the results.