Industrial wastewater treatment with the static granular bed reactor versus the UASB

Abstract

Performance of the static granular bed reactor (SGBR) was compared to the upflow anaerobic sludge blanket (UASB) reactor. A statistically designed study was performed to establish significance of differences between the two reactors operating at three different hydraulic retention times (HRTs); 8, 16, and 24 hours. The reactors treated a synthetic wastewater composed of sucrose and non-fat dry milk (NFDM). In the experiment-wise analysis, chemical oxygen demand (COD) removal was significantly higher for the SGBR. Specifically, the SGBR outperformed the UASB at an HRT of eight hours with a COD removal of 90.7% versus 77.5%. Specific COD removal was higher for the UASB ranging from 0.19 to 0.94 gCOD/(gVS·d) versus 0.11 to 0.34 gCOD/(gVS·d) for the SGBR.