Improving the biological treatment of waste water using pressurised sequencing batch reactor

Pollution is one of the major problems that mankind faces nowadays. Society’s expectations of waste water treatment have evolved over time. While protecting aquatic environment and public health continues to be a paramount concern, the desire to recover clean water, energy and useful resources from waste water is getting increasingly stronger today. The current study aims to reduce the pollution of water and air resulting from the biological treatment process by using a new technique (pressurised sequencing batch reactor (SBR) model) through improvement of waste water treatment performance and control of the surplus air resulting from the aeration process and reusing it more than once in the aeration process. The results showed that the pressurised SBR model compared with conventional SBR model enhanced the biochemical oxygen demand removal, the total suspended solids removal and total dissolved solids removal by 6, 8 and 12%, respectively, at a gauge pressure of 0·5 atm and by about 9, 15 and 19%, respectively, at a gauge pressure of 2 atm. In addition, the enhancement in the nitrogen and phosphorus removal was remarkable.