ABSTRACT

Brewing is a water-intensive process that involves the use of a range of chemicals. The organic contents from brewery consists of sugars, soluble starch, ethanol, volatile fatty acids and solids which are mainly spent grains, yeasts and trub.Untreated brewery wastes quantitatively contains suspended solids (100-1500mg/l), chemical Oxygen Demand (COD), (300-800mg/l), nitrogen(30-100mg/l) and phosphorus(10-30mg/l). This study investigates the use of local waste material from agricultural waste (palm kernel shells) in the removal of dissolved matter in wastewater from a brewery industry. The palm kernel shells was carbonized at 600^oC and adsorption study was conducted by studying effects of process variables such as adsorbent dosage, and contact time on the efficiency of reduction of dissolved particulate matter in an experiment conducted in a batch process. Results obtained showed that the adsorption increased with the adsorbent dosage and at optimum adsorbent dosage above 50.0g/l of effluent with an average contaminant reduction of about 70%. The results also revealed that the % removal of average particle pollutants rises with time up to 120 minutes before stabilizing towards the end of the experiment. The results obtained also showed that COD was effectively reduced. The Langmuir isotherm, Freundlich isotherm and the Temkin isotherm were used to determine the best isotherm that fits the experimental adsorption data, and the Langmuir isotherm can be used to correlate the equilibrium data with the regression coefficient, R², being 0.9895, which is the highest when compared to Freundlich isotherm and the Temkin isotherm with R² values of 0.9697 and 0.9844.