Note: This research product won a gold medal at the International Trade Fair (Ideas-Inventions-New Products) held at the Nuremberg Exhibition Center, Germany from 3 to 6 November 2005.
Researchers
Prof. Madya Abdul Latif Ahmad ([email protected])
Dr. Bassim Hj. Hameed
Sumathi Sethupathi
Chitec is a natural, modified carbohydrate biopolymer. It is widely distributed in nature and is a cellulose-like material. Chitec is recommended as a suitable resource material because it has excellent properties such as bio-degradability, biocompability, adsorption property, flocculating ability, anti-bacterial property and polyelectrolisity. Its largest use is as a non-toxic flocculent in the treatment of organic polluted wastewater. Hence Chitec can be classified as an environmental friendly polymer.
Chitec was produced in lab scale using abundant shrimp shell wastes. THe chitec processing method involves the deacetylation of chitin with a strong alkali. The cost of making Chitec is cheap because it involves only acidic and alkaline treatment. Since the quality is meant for oily wastewater treatment, comprehensive and costly production of Chitec is superfluous.
In this finding, palm oil mill effluent’s (POME) residue oil was used as representative of various types of residue oil available. Removal of POME’s residue oil using Chitec was very promising i.e about 99% removal. Chitec was also found to be capable of removing the turbidity and suspended solid of POME. This proves that Chitec can be a potential flocsorb. After removing the oil residue using Chitec from POME, the suspended material could be used as a possible fertilizer. Hence, using Chitec in this process could be a new and simple method of removing residue oil from oily wastewaters compared to the use of detrimental synthetic polymers currently used in industries.
