Water turbidity - Dangers of cloudy river and drinking water

3 Minute Water and Waste Water Video Tutorials by AET

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Water turbidity is an important measuring unit to determine water quality and describes the degree of water cloudiness.
Turbidity is caused by a huge number of small particles that are suspended in water and invisible to the human eye. While bigger particles are settling down rapidly, small particles – also known as colloids - are settling down very slowly or not at all.
Turbidity in rivers or lakes is often caused by human activities like construction, mining and agriculture. Storm water runoff after a rainfall can wash up sediments from urbanized areas, industries and farmland.
Suspended particles absorb heat from the sunlight and lead to water temperature increase. Also, a high turbidity scatters the light so that photosynthetic activity at deeper water levels is minimized. Both reduces the amount of oxygen which causes a decrease of aerobe microorganisms and deterioration of the self-cleaning effect of water.
Turbidity in drinking water and tap water can cause diseases because viruses or bacteria can be attached to suspended solids. Even disinfectants such as chlorine or UV sterilization have only limited success at high turbidity levels. This is because suspended solids interfere with the disinfectants and act as shields for viruses and bacteria.
Tap water travels trough miles of water supply pipes and can pick up cloudiness due to broken or dirty pipes. The WHO (World Health Organization) published that the turbidity of tap water should ideally be below 1 NTU. If you are unsure about the quality of your tap water, you can test it with a turbidity meter.
In wastewater treatment plants flocculants and coagulants are dosed to water with high turbidity. They alter electrical charges of particles so that they clump together and form bigger particles. The bigger particles are then settled down in sedimentation basins which are often equipped with lamella clarifiers for enhanced particle settling.

Видео Water turbidity - Dangers of cloudy river and drinking water канала Karl-Uwe Schmitz