The Buffer Effect of Biological Activated Carbon to the Shock Loading in Sequencing Batch Reactor

Cha, Woosuk; Choi, Heechul; Ha, Sungryong

Environmental Engineering Research 1998;3(1): 41-46.

Woosuk Cha¹^†, Heechul Choi¹, and Sungryong Ha²

¹Dept, of Environmental Engineering, Korea Institute of Construction Technology, Korea
²Environmental Engineering Program, Asian Institute of Technology, Thailand

Corresponding Author: Woosuk Cha ,

Received: February 13, 1998; Accepted: March 2, 1998.

ABSTRACT

Granular activated carbon was added into SBR with the activated carbon dosage of 5 g/1, in order to find the buffer effect of GAC in SBR to the shock loadings. Phenol was fed to the reactor as the only carbon source and phenol concentration in the influent was suddenly changed with various high concentrations to apply the shock loading. Three types of shock loadings, long-terra shock, short-term fluctuation, and step-wise augmentation, were applied to compare the responses of simple SBR and BAC-SBR During the first long-term shock loading, BAC-SBR showed a good tolerance to the sudden change of influent concentrations, from 500 to 2000mg/l, with the effluent phenol concentration of below lmg/1 for first two-cycle time, i.e., 16 hours. The hourly changes were measured during the reaction time and showed that BAC played a role as a buffer at the early stage of reaction period, about 30 to 60 minutes, by pulling down the high initial concentration into lower level through adsorption. Throughout the experiment, BAC revealed its bioregeneration capability, resulting in the continuous adsorption capacity for more than 70 cycles without changing or refilling the activated carbon. The maximum tolerable sludge loading rate was 3 and 17 percent higher in BAC-SBR than SBR alone at the influent phenol concentration of 2000 and 2500mg/l, respectively. And additional mixing could provide higher tolerable SLR even in SBR as well as in BAC-SBR.

Keywords: Biological activated carbon | Shock loading | Sequencing batch reactor | Phenol | Buffer effect