EVALUATION OF A NEW BIO-BASED-FLOCULANT EXTRACTED FROM WATER-MELON, ON THE REMOVAL OF LEAD IONS FROM WATER

Water is one of the main needs of living things, especially humans who need clean water for drinking, bathing, washing and other purposes. However, many regions have difficulties to get clean water, especially people who live on the beach, thus many experts try to process seawater into clean water which is worth drinking. One of the ways to process salt water into fresh water is by distillation. In this research, the author tries to distill water with the help of condenser. In this research, the author made an evaporation chamber of 80 cm x 100 cm x 30 cm. Through the use of solar-powered blower, vapor is inhaled from the evaporation chamber, therefore the pressure on the evaporation chamber will fall, so that the evaporation will occur much faster and the resulting vapor can be supplied to the condenser for cooling. From the test result using variation of blower rotation of 2800 rpm, 2200 rpm, and 1200 rpm, each condensate water produced from the distillation process are 215 ml/h, 410 ml/h, and 250 ml/hr. The condensate resulted from the highest rotation (2800 rpm) produces less condensate, thus based on our observation, we temporarily conclude that it occurs because there is water vapor coming out from the condensate, but more accurate research is needed to confirm it. Condensate of 410 ml/hour is still not as expected, thus this research will be continued in order to reach the expected result.