Bacteriological water quality and its relationship with the oxide reduction potential (ORP)

Abstract

This article presents the relationship between the bacteriological quality of water and the oxide-reduction potential (ORP) in a water treatment plant. For this, a monitoring it was carry out determining the values of ORP and fecal and total coliforms in the fast filtration unit and in the reservoir of drinking water with disinfected water. According to the results obtained, the presence of fecal and total coliforms occurred with average values of oxide-reduction potential (ORP) of 250 mV, and the absence of these was presented with an average ORP of 760 mV. The research work showed that there is a relation of presence absence of fecal and total coliforms with respect to the potential of oxide reduction, so it is possible to use this parameter to determine the presence or absence of coliforms in water in a water treatment plant. According to the statistical analysis performed for the data obtained from coliforms in the filtration unit, it was obtained that there is no direct correlation between the ORP and fecal and total coliforms, given that the Pearson coefficients found were -0.203, -0.388 with a significance of 0.549 and 0.239 respectively, which shows that there is no statistically significant relationship between these variables. For ORP values below 300 mV, there is no linear behavior that allows to establish the ratio of fecal and total coliforms with the oxide-reduction potential.