A septic tank combined with a sand filter is the most common onsite wastewater treatment system worldwide, since it is a simple, lowcost and reliable treatment method. Alternatives to sand in filters could be advantageous in terms of availability of material and enhanced treatment properties. In this study, flow dynamics and pollutant transport in three filter materials; sand, pine bark and act...

In this paper, results ofa new sand filter design were presented. The drawer compacted sand filter (DCSF) is a modified design for a sand filter in which the sand layer is broken down into several layers, each of which is 10 cm high and placed in a movable drawer separated by a 10 cm space. A lab-scale DCSF was designed and operated for 330 days fed by synthetic grey water. The response of draw...

background : appropriate methodology for storage biological materials, extraction of dna, and proper dna preservation is vital for studies involving genetic analysis of insects, bacteria, and reservoir hosts as well as for molecular diagnostics of pathogens carried by vectors and reservoirs. here we tried to evaluate the utility of a simple filter paper-based for storage of insects, bacteria, r...

Little is known about the forces that determine the assembly of diverse bacterial communities inhabiting drinking water treatment filters and how this affects drinking water quality. Two contrasting ecological theories can help to understand how natural microbial communities assemble; niche theory and neutral theory, where environmental deterministic factors or stochastic factors predominate re...

If you’ve ever found yourself struggling under a heavy pile of suitcases at the end of a holiday, spare a thought for the porters in some of the planet’s most remote locations. ‘When you start looking around, professional porters all around the world carry loads supported by their heads’, says Norman Heglund, from the Université catholique de Louvain, Belgium, who is fascinated by the technique...

This laboratory study examined the use of various wood materials as a carbon source in horizontal flow filters to denitrify nitrate-nitrogen (NO3-N) from a synthetic wastewater. The filter materials were: sawdust (Pinus radiata), sawdust and soil, sawdust and sand, and medium-chip wood chippings and sand. Two influent concentrations of NO3-N, 200 mg L(-1) and 60 mg L(-1), loaded at 2.9 to 19.4 ...