Development of a coliforms monitoring system using an enzymatic fluorescence method

A coliforms monitoring system in treated effluent of a wastewater treatment plant has been developed. In order to achieve rapid monitoring within 1 hour, an enzymatic fluorescence method without a culturing process was introduced to this system. It converts the increase rate of fluorescence intensity as enzymatic activity into the number of coliforms instead of converting fluorescence intensity itself. A flow injection analysis is used in this system for automatic measurement. Moreover, it is equipped with the pre-filtering unit to remove the interfering substances in the suspended solids causing deterioration in measurement precision. The good relationship (correlation coefficient of 0.90) between the obtained values using this system and the analysed values using the conventional direct counting method was observed in a test at an existing wastewater treatment plant.