Faculty of Civil Engineering

Landfill leachate contains high concentration of contaminants in the form of nitrogen, suspended solids and heavy metals, which effects the environment adversely.  Hence leachate treatment is considered vital in landfill management as the effluent needs to undergo several treatments before being discharged into natural water bodies.  Without treatment, the leachate will contaminate the surface and ground water as it can penetrate through soils and subsoils. Several methods have been applied for the treatment of landfill leachate. However, these methods have several constraints due to area required and cost incurred. This paper presents the application of electrocoagulation in removing pollutants from landfill leachate; particularly ammonia-nitrogen and heavy metals.  Three metals namely aluminium, iron and zinc were used as electrodes.  Aluminium electrode was found to be the most effective where it was capable to extract 89% of zinc and 75% of iron in 30-minute retention time.   Su...

The extensive production of polymer plastics and their use in different commercial applications had burdened the municipal in cost and operation of the waste management system. This unwanted waste had also posed a significant threat to the environmental surroundings which destroyed biota. Hence, alternatives called bio-plastic evolved as the development of renewable resource by utilizing agricultural, eggshells and exo-skeleton seafood (chitosan) wastes instead of petroleum sources. The aim of this research is to use the eggshells and chitosan as fillers in potato starch to overcome the inherent drawbacks of bio-plastic. The experimental study was done on tensile strength, water absorption and biodegradability for potato starch-based bio-plastic with eggshells or chitosan. The results showed that by adding the eggshells into the potato starch-based bio-plastic had increased the tensile strength by 4.94% compared with chitosan only 1.28%. The reduction of water absorption by 10.95% w...

Towards the 21st century, domestic consumer water demand has kept increasing from time to time. Groundwater may be an alternative source to fulfil this demand especially at the dry areas such as in Perlis. To serve the consumer demand using groundwater, the quality of the groundwater is a major factor to be considered as its contamination may be harmful to human health. In this study the quality of the groundwater currently abstracted from four different geological formations in Perlis which are the Chuping Limestone formation, Setul Limestone formation, Tertiary Bukit Arang formation and Kubang Pasu-Singa formation, are measured using onsite and laboratory tests techniques. From the tests carried on these samples, the groundwater quality is found differed with each other where iron, hardness, copper, chloride and COD concentrations were found high at certain locations. While several parameters were found to exceed the Malaysian Drinking Water Quality Standard. At all locations the ...