THE STRIPPING OF AMMONIA FROM LANDFILL LEACHATE IN PLUG FLOW REACTORS

Abstract

The leachate is a highly liquid polluting, considering, besides high concentrations of ammonia nitrogen. Treating leachate is a very difficult task once its composition is very complex. A king of treatment that is being developed is the stripping of ammonia where this chemical will be removed from the leachate by mass transfer of the liquid phase to gas. Therefore, this paper addressed to study the ammonia stripping process in leachates liquids using plug-flow reactors in series. In order to accomplish the experimental part four plugflow reactors in series were build, with an average height of 50 centimeters, without forced air supplier and without leachate pH adjustment. The leachate sample used was from the metropolitan landfill of Joao Pessoa city, which was collected and transported to the EXTRABES laboratory and made the physicochemical characterization. The experimental monitoring system consisted of four distinct phases, with applied superficial loads of 450, 500, 600 and 700 kg NH4+ ha-1 day-1, hydraulic detention time equal to 65, 60, 50 and 38 days, and it was obtained an average efficiency of ammonia nitrogen removal around 96.1%, 99.7%, 99.5% and 98.5% respectively. It was found that the removal efficiency of NH3 was satisfactory in all phases, however, the kinetic study showed that the higher the surface charge applied to the reactors, the higher the rate constant for removal of NH3 stripping process. Thus we can conclude that the process of stripping ammonia from landfill leachate may be done in plug-flow reactors in series, with an average depth of 50 cm, due to provide high removal efficiency of ammonia nitrogen, with low operating costs.