Water Filtration by Ceramic Water Filter Added With Silica-based Bambusoideae via Slip Casting Method

In this study, the silica is extracted from the bamboo through several processes which include burning and leaching. The morphology of the silica is examined using Scanning Electron Microscope (SEM) that shows the silica is in amorphous state and contain many pores. Other than that, the purity of the silica is also determined using X-Ray Diffraction(XRF) which result in 76.6% of SiO2 content. To test the effectiveness in addition of silica into ceramic water filter, five different type of filter are formulated with different composition of silica and sawdust. The water sample from river in UMK Jeli are acquired and being filtered using five of the ceramic water filters. The water quality of the filtered water was tested and compared with the raw water river. Several tests are being made to examine the efficiency of the ceramic water filter.
The flow rate of the water from different types of ceramic is affected with the thickness of its wall. This shows by the increasing of flow rate of the ceramic filter that have low thickness of the wall. The turbidity test are being made and resulted removal efficiency of 97% and above for all of the type of filter. Four different parameter of water quality which is temperature, Dissolved Oxygen (DO), Total Dissolved Solid (TDS) and pH are tested. Heavy metal also plays an important roles in water quality analysis. Thus, the heavy metal of filtered water was test by using Atomic Absorption Spectroscopy (AAS) and compared with raw river water. The test shows that there is notable reduction in filtered water compared to raw water. The bacterial removal was tested using spread plate method. However, the result does not conclude that the ceramic water filter is able to reduce the amount of bacteria in the water Keywords : Silica, Ceramic water filter, water quality