Concept and application of anaerobic suspended granular sludge bed (SGSB) reactor for wastewater treatment

Abstract

Bed expansion serves an important function in the design and operation of an upflow anaerobic reactor. An analysis of the flow pattern of expanded granular sludge bed (EGSB) reactors shows that most EGSB reactors do not behave as expanded bed reactors, as is widely perceived. Rather, these reactors behave as fluidized bed reactors based on the classic chemical reactor theory. In this paper, four bed expansion modes, divided as static bed, expanded bed, suspended bed, and fluidized bed, for bioreactors are proposed. A high-rate anaerobic suspended granular sludge bed (SGSB) reactor was then developed. The SGSB reactor is an upflow anaerobic reactor, and its expansion degree can be easily controlled within a range to maintain the suspended status of the sludge bed by controlling upflow velocity. The results of the full-scale reactor confirmed that the use of SGSB reactors is advantageous. The full-scale SGSB reactor runs stably and achieves high COD removal efficiency (about 90%) at high loading rates (average 40 kg-COD·m^-3·d^-1, maximum to 52 kg-COD·m^-3·d^-1) based on the SGSB theory, and its expansion degree is between 22% and 37%.

Keywords

expansion characteristic / high-rate bioreactor / anaerobic suspended granular sludge bed / expanded granular sludge bed reactor

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Acknowledgements

This study was supported by the National Natural Science Foundation of China (Grant Nos. 50978146 and 51278271) and by the Environmental Scientific Research in the Public Interest (No. 201009017) from the Ministry of Environmental Protection of China.

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2014 Higher Education Press and Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg