Comparative Study on Water Treatment Technologies: Photocatalysis and Nanofiltration with Pollution Assessment using Principal Component Analysis

Lake Réghaïa is a site of international ecological importance, but it is threatened by the discharge of organic and inorganic waste from the Rouiba-Reghaïa industrial zone via the two Oued El-Biar and Oued Réghaïa wadis. The first part of the study is focused on monitoring pollution parameters by means of a statistical study using the principal component analysis (PCA) method. The aim is to characterize water chemistry for an observation period, and to give a preliminary idea of the elements and sites of pollution at the various points of the lake. In the second part, two treatment processes were studied: photocatalysis and nanofiltration. The application of PCA to our results, using IBM SPSS Statistics 26 software, was carried out on a matrix of dimensions (13x7) where the rows represent the physical-chemical pollution parameters and the columns are the sampling points. The study shows that treatment by photocatalysis is the most effective way of continuing the treatment of lake water, since it allows mineralization of our organic pollution, followed by measurement of the chemical oxygen demand (COD), with faster degradation kinetics of pollutants in the presence of electron acceptors (H₂O₂, S₂O₈^2- and O₂). Whereas results for membrane filtration show better COD removal at a pH of equal to 10 and 5.