Treatment of dilute wastewater using different types of support media in anaerobic fluidized bed membrane bioreactors

• Main Author: Tai, Jia Yi
• Other Authors: Philip Wong
• Format: Final Year Project
• Language: English
• Published: 2013
• Subjects: DRNTU::Engineering
• Online Access: http://hdl.handle.net/10356/53375
• Institution: Nanyang Technological University

Anaerobic wastewater treatment is advantageous over its aerobic counterpart due to reasons including lower energy expenditure and the possibility to recover energy in the process. However, with the use of membrane in anaerobic treatment process, fouling is one major issue when membrane pores are clogged due to flocculation of sludge agglomerate and accumulated biomass. One way of fouling control is to include carriers in the system such that immobilization of biomass help decrease the dispersed biomass in the bulk and mitigate fouling as a result. In addition, extracellular polymeric substances (EPS) and soluble microbial products (SMP) also contribute to controlling membrane fouling. In this study, seven types of support media are tested within the two-stage anaerobic fluidized bed membrane bioreactor. Five commercialized carriers, namely polyethylene (PE), polypropylene (PP), polycarbonate (PC), ethylene vinyl acetate (EVA), activated alumina (AAl), are tested and compared to the commonly used powdered activated carbon (PAC) and granular activated carbon (GAC). This study seeks to determine the most suitable carrier for anaerobic wastewater treatment by evaluating the operational cost, biological and membrane performance. Looking at the energy optimization, COD removal, SMP, EPS, VFA and TMP results, it was found out that PAC performed best among the seven support media. Out of the commercialized carriers tested, EVA was good in COD removal and SMP release.