ORIGINAL PAPER Management of shock loads wastewater produced from water heaters industry S. I. Abou-Elela 1 • S. A. El-Shafai 1 • M. E. Fawzy 1 • M. S. Hellal 1 • O. Kamal 2 Received: 6 February 2017 / Revised: 14 June 2017 / Accepted: 13 July 2017 Ó Islamic Azad University (IAU) 2017 Abstract Water heater manufacturing represents one sec- tor of household electrical appliance industry. It includes several batch processes which resulted in a highly polluted wastewater as shock loads. The objective of this study was to manage the shock loads wastewater with a simple and cost-effective approach prior to final discharge into municipality. To achieve this objective, two approaches were studied. The first approach was the chemical treat- ment of the accumulated shock loads wastewater using alum and an anionic polymer. Although this approach produced a very high-quality effluent, it was economically and technically infeasible. The second approach was a controlled release of the shock loads to the normal daily discharge in a way that guarantees the compliance of the end-off-pipe with the National Regulatory Standards. This solution required establishment of an equalization tank for normal daily flow and a holding tank for controlled release of the shock loads. Mathematical calculations were carried out to determine the most violating parameters in order to calculate the mixing ratio the of shock loads with the normal daily flow. Full engineering design of the proposed solution was carried out. This approach was implemented and proved to be simple, easy to operate, cost-effective and can be replicated in similar batch processing manufacturing plants. Keywords Waste management Á Water heaters Á Chemical treatment Á Hazardous wastes Á Control release Introduction Household electrical appliance industry has many batch manufacturing processes which generate many hazardous pollutants such as heavy metals, volatile organics, alkali and acid fumes and paint residues (Telukdarie et al. 2006). Water heater manufacturing represents one sector of this industry. It includes several batch processes such as metal preparation, galvanization, enameling and coating. This industry is growing rapidly and results in many environ- mental problems and defined as one of the most polluting industries (Zhang et al. 2014). The code of federal regu- lation defined wastewater from both metal preparation operations and enameling coating operations as a source of heavy metals and toxic pollutants and should be managed before its final disposal to public sewerage network (CFR 40,425.01). Generally, electroplating industry receives great attention as the main source of heavy metal pollution. Physical, chemical and/or biological processes are used for the treatment of wastewater generated from such industry (Abou-Elela et al. 2008a, b). Recently, relatively new technologies have been used such as polishing with con- structed wetlands (Sochacki et al. 2014), permeable reac- tive barriers (Liu et al. 2013), nanofiltration membrane technology (Wang et al. 2013), H 2 O 2 oxidation followed by Fenton process (Zhao et al. 2013), combined electro- chemical and ozonation methods (Orescanin et al. 2013) and UV/TiO 2 photocatalysis (Huda et al. 2013). In last few years, batch processing industries have received increasing attention. Chang and Li (2006) described the batch processing as the predominant means Editorial responsibility: Binbin Huang. & S. I. Abou-Elela sohairela@gmail.com 1 Water Pollution Research Department, National Research Centre, P. Box 12622, Dokki, Giza, Egypt 2 Environics Company, Giza, Egypt 123 Int. J. Environ. Sci. Technol. DOI 10.1007/s13762-017-1433-9