Evaluating the cleaning efficacy of citric acid, mitigating ecological risks and ensuring mosquito safety

Author

Marimo, Nadine

Title

Evaluating the cleaning efficacy of citric acid, mitigating ecological risks and ensuring mosquito safety

Abstract

This study aims to evaluate citric acid’s effectiveness in cleaning contaminated distillers and its potential to reduce environmental. Distillers often accumulate pollutants that can damage the environment if not properly cleaned. Citric acid an organic substance, is being investigated as a possible environmentally friendly alternative to traditional cleaning agents as compared to sodium hypochlorite. A statistical test (one-way ANOVA) to compare distillers cleaned with sodium hypochlorite, non -distilled water and citric acid. Each group had three samples. The experiments managed to measure the average contamination level and how much the levels varied within each group.
Results: the statistical test showed a difference between the groups with a p value of 0.0005. Sodium hypochlorite had a low average contamination, followed by citric acid and non-distilled water had high contamination rate. Both sodium hypochlorite and citric acid were significantly better than non-distilled water. The negative control group had a mean of 62 CFU/ml, the positive group had a mean of 15 and the citric acid group had a mean of 5CFU/ml. The standard deviation of the negative control group was the highest with 8.6603, this could have been caused by the inconsistency of contaminated water source.
Conclusion: both sodium hypochlorite and citric acid can effectively reduce contamination in distillers.

Date

December 2024

Publisher

BUSE

Keywords

Citric Acid

Contamination

Sodium Hypochlorite

One-way ANOVA

Distiller

Supervisor

Dr. N. Mgocheki