
What Is Biological Wastewater Treatment?
- Biological wastewater treatment harnesses the action of bacteria and other microorganisms to clean water. Biological...
- Aerobic Wastewater Treatment. Aerobic wastewater treatment processes include simple septic or aerobic tanks, and...
- MABR Treatment. In recent years, technological advances have been transforming biological...
Full Answer
How can we treat waste water with biological methods?
nature of toxicity associated with waste water. The classification of techniques for the removal or the reduction of the contaminants based on the need and the available technol ogy is as follows: 1. Biological treatment: Aerobic digestion (oxidation) of the effluent and anaerobic waste minimisation. 2.
What is the biological treatment for waste water?
Membrane technologies are gaining traction in industrial wastewater treatment due to their higher efficiency in treating chemical oxygen demand, biological oxygen demand, total suspended substance ...
What is biological wastewater treatment?
What Is Biological Wastewater Treatment?
- Biological wastewater treatment harnesses the action of bacteria and other microorganisms to clean water. ...
- Aerobic Wastewater Treatment. ...
- MABR Treatment. ...
- Anaerobic Treatment. ...
- Further Treatment. ...
What are the side effects of biological therapy?
Several types of biological therapy exist, including:
- Adoptive cell transfer
- Angiogenesis inhibitors
- Bacillus Calmette-Guerin therapy
- Biochemotherapy
- Cancer vaccines
- Chimeric antigen receptor (CAR) T-cell therapy
- Cytokine therapy
- Gene therapy
- Immune checkpoint modulators
- Immunoconjugates

What do you mean by biological treatment of water?
Biological wastewater treatment is designed to degrade pollutants dissolved in effluents by the action of microorganisms. The microorganisms utilize these substances to live and reproduce. Pollutants are used as nutrients.
What is the biological treatment?
A type of treatment that uses substances made from living organisms to treat disease. These substances may occur naturally in the body or may be made in the laboratory.
What is a biological wastewater treatment system and how does it work?
Biological treatments rely on bacteria, nematodes, or other small organisms to break down organic wastes using normal cellular processes. Wastewater typically contains a buffet of organic matter, such as garbage, wastes, and partially digested foods. It also may contain pathogenic organisms, heavy metals, and toxins.
What is the purpose of biological treatment of drinking water?
Systems that use bacteria to treat drinking water have been shown to be highly efficient and environmentally sustainable. Microbial biomass has been used since the early 1900s to degrade contaminants, nutrients, and organics in wastewater.
What are the advantages of biological treatment?
Compared to other treatment methods, biological methods have certain advantages such as (1) treatment technology is traditional and well understood; (2) enhanced efficiency in terms of organic content removal; (3) cost-effective; and (4) environment friendly and safe.
What is the objective of biological treatment?
Main objectives of biological treatment to remove or reduce the concentration of organic, inorganic compounds nutrients specially nitrogen and phosphorus. Also denitrification of common terminology used for biological treatment process.
How do you treat BOD in water?
You can reduce COD and BOD by adding hydrogen peroxide to the wastewater solution. The hydrogen peroxide will chemically attack the organics in the wastewater, degrading them and reducing the measured COD and BOD.
What is a secondary or biological treatment?
Secondary treatment removes the dissolved organic matter by the use of biological agents and hence, known as biological treatment. This is achieved by microbes which can consume and degrade the organic matter converting it to carbon dioxide, water, and energy for their own growth and reproduction.
What is a biological drink?
BIOLOGICAL DRINKING WATER TREATMENT. As illustrated in Figure 1, biological drinking water treatment relies on. naturally occurring bacteria to mediate the transfer of electrons between. reduced compounds (electron donors) such as dissolved organic carbon. (DOC) and oxidized compounds (electron acceptors) such as ...
What are the 4 steps of water treatment?
Water treatment stepsCoagulation. Coagulation is often the first step in water treatment. ... Flocculation. Flocculation follows the coagulation step. ... Sedimentation. Sedimentation is one of the steps water treatment plants use to separate out solids from the water. ... Filtration. ... Disinfection.
Current Methods for the Remediation of Acid Mine Drainage Including Continuous Removal of Metals From Wastewater and Mine Dump
Opeyemi A. Oyewo, ... Mokgadi F. Bobape, in Bio-Geotechnologies for Mine Site Rehabilitation, 2018
Aquatic Chemistry and Biology
Biological treatment has played an important role historically in drinking-water preparation in processes such as slow sand filtration, bank filtration, and underground passage.
Nitrogen-containing organic compounds: Origins, toxicity and conditions of their photocatalytic mineralization over TiO2
Drissa Bamba, ... Didier Robert, in Science of The Total Environment, 2017
New directions and challenges in engineering biologically-enhanced biochar for biological water treatment
Anjali Jayakumar, ... Ondřej Mašek, in Science of The Total Environment, 2021
Review on discharge Plasma for water treatment: mechanism, reactor geometries, active species and combined processes
Hichem Zeghioud, ... Aymen Amine Assadi, in Journal of Water Process Engineering, 2020
What are the different types of wastewater treatment?
Typically broken out into three main categories, biological wastewater treatment can be: 1 aerobic, when microorganisms require oxygen to break down organic matter to carbon dioxide and microbial biomass 2 anaerobic, when microorganisms do not require oxygen to break down organic matter, often forming methane, carbon dioxide, and excess biomass 3 anoxic, when microorganisms use other molecules than oxygen for growth, such as for the removal of sulfate, nitrate, nitrite, selenate, and selenite
What is a fixed bed wastewater system?
A well-engineered fixed-bed will allow wastewater to flow through the system without channeling or plugging. Chambers can be aerobic and still have anoxic zones to achieve aerobic carbonaceous removal and full anoxic denitrification at the same time.
How are suspended flocs removed from wastewater?
The suspended flocs enter a settling tank and are removed from the wastewater by sedimentation. Recycling of settled solids to the aeration tank controls levels of suspended solids, while excess solids are wasted as sludge.
How does a biological trickling filter work?
They work by passing air or water through a media designed to collect a biofilm on its surfaces. The biofilm may be composed of both aerobic and anaerobic bacteria which breakdown organic contaminants in water or air.
What is aerobic microbiology?
aerobic, when microorganisms require oxygen to break down organic matter to carbon dioxide and microbial biomass. anaerobic, when microorganisms do not require oxygen to break down organic matter, often forming methane, carbon dioxide, and excess biomass. anoxic, when microorganisms use other molecules than oxygen for growth, ...
When was the moving bed bioreactor invented?
Moving bed bioreactors, or MBBRs, invented in the late 1980s in Norway, already has been applied in over 800 applications in more than 50 countries, with approximately half treating domestic wastewater and half treating industrial wastewater.
When was activated sludge first used?
Activated sludge was first developed in the early 1900s in England and has become the conventional biological treatment process widely used in municipal applications but can also be used in other industrial applications.
What is biological water treatment?
Biological water treatment processes rely partially or entirely on biological mechanisms to achieve treatment objectives. These processes broadly include natural (e.g., riverbank and aquifer filtration) and engineered (e.g., fluidized bed as well as slow sand and rapid-rate filtration) processes. In drinking water treatment, ‘biofiltration’ processes in North America typically involve rapid-rate, granular media filters that are similar in design to conventional, physico-chemical filtration processes [1–3 ], whereas slow sand filters see continued use internationally. Biofilters differ from conventional filters through key operational practices that promote and maintain biological activity on the filter media, which enhances the transformation of organic and inorganic constituents before treated water is introduced into the distribution system (American Water Works Association Biological Drinking Water Treatment Committee, J. Carter, personal communication). In this Current Opinion, we draw heavily on the literature from the past three years to review advancements in the science and practice of drinking water biofiltration as well as to discuss the potential role of modern biotechnological tools to further this advancement.
What are biofilms used for?
Apart from the negative effects of biofouling in filtration, biofilms are used in biological water treatment, e.g. removal of carbon and nitrogen compounds in municipal and industrial wastewater treatment [194]. Increasingly, biofilms are discussed as dedicated reactors of basic chemicals. The biomass can be organized as biofilms, granules or sludge flocks in the diverse reactor designs. The strong correlation between biomass structures and water diffusion was discussed in Sections 3.1 and 3.2. For the technical applications, those findings are of high relevance. Most technically used biomass is characterized by physico-chemical parameters, such as TSS (total suspended solids), VSS (volatile suspended solids), and biomass density or settling ability. However, these parameters do not sufficiently or comprehensively describe the biomass to estimate mass transport as shown for example in Ref. [69]. By using the already mentioned NMR methods, it was shown that the physico-chemical parameters for completely different biomass systems (e.g. carrier-based biofilms and sludge flocks) differ, but their water diffusion properties can be very similar. The knowledge gained by the diverse NMR modalities helps to better understand the performance of the biological systems and gives indications for process improvements regarding biofilm thickness control or mixing. One example for a bioreactor is the concept of a moving bed biofilm reactor (MBBR) where carrier-based biofilms are continuously circulated by mechanical or hydrodynamic mixing to ensure sufficient mass transport of substrates to the biofilm surface [13,14,195,196]. An equally distributed thickness of the biofilm is favoured by shear forces and turbulence in the MBBR [197]. Uncertainties in hydrodynamics in the reactor regarding the mass transport of solutes from bulk to biofilm and reactor design have been reported [198]. MR flow velocity maps in real biofilm carriers revealed that the biofilm thickness and coverage on the carrier material are critical for the local flow regimes: some regions might be blocked by biofilm and therefore the transport of solutes is limited [47,199]. Stagnating conditions have been observed which might lead to a decreased overall performance of the biological water treatment system. By NMR methods, process parameters influencing the biofilm structure can be studied to give indications for improvement of the engineered biofilm system.
What is the sonochemical process?
In addition to the chemical synthesis processes, the sonochemical method has a wide application area in the conversion of biomass to biofuels. Sonochemical processes in biofuel and related fields are numerous. These processes include pretreatment of lignocellulosic structures, sonochemistry of carbohydrates, natural product extraction, fermentation, organic waste pretreatment, biological water treatment, and biotechnology/bioengineering [37–39]. In these mentioned applications with ultrasonic support, the future advantages of the ultrasonic reaction mechanism, ultrasonic condensation, and ultrasonic pretreatment applications need to be evaluated very well. In the studies examined to date, the effects of lignocellulosic structures, microwaves, and biodiesel on sonochemical pretreatment applications and biomass conversion rates have been studied and explained. The conversion of biomass into biofuel contains some difficulties to be overcome. In order to overcome these difficulties, the structures in the structure of the biomass should be illuminated. Raw biomass contains various structures containing lignin, cellulose, hemicellulose, free sugar, beeswax, proteins, trace organic-inorganic, and alkaloids, such as a large number of complex structures. Almost the whole of these structures in biomass are indefinite chemical structures. Cellulosic structures in biomass have a continuous repetitive structure, and lignin complex has a reticular connection structure [9]. The degradation of the lignin-carbohydrate structure in the raw biomass requires a high temperature-pressure environment, namely, harsh conditions. The selection of the appropriate solvent for the degradation of the structures in this biomass is one of the issues that should be considered carefully in biomass conversion. Ultrasonic energy can be an appropriate tool for overcoming these troublesome problems, because it provides suitable physicochemical conditions in the processing of complex structures in biomass. Compared to thermochemical methods with the introduction of high-intensity ultrasonic energy into the biomass, the conversion of biomass under lower valence conditions leads to degradation and high-efficiency catalytic reactions. With the applied ultrasonic energy, heat and mass transfer in the reactions take place at high intensity. The intermediate causes the contact of reagents and products to increase, and the reaction kinetics accelerate [9].
How does biological wastewater treatment work?
Biological wastewater treatment is designed to degrade pollutants dissolved in effluents by the action of microorganisms. The microorganisms utilize these substances to live and reproduce. Pollutants are used as nutrients. A prerequisite for such degradation activity, however, is that the pollutants are soluble in water and nontoxic. Degradation process can take place either in the presence of oxygen (aerobic treatment) or in the absence of oxygen (anaerobic treatment). Both these naturally occurring principles of effluent treatment give rise to fundamental differences in the technical and economic processes involved (Table 2 ).
What is biological method?
Biological method requires large land area, diurnal, and greater time for their functioning. (d) The process provides little flexibility in design and operation. Numerous studies depict the use of micro-organisms and leads to the removal of dye via a biosorption process.
What is phytoremediation in wastewater treatment?
Phytoremediation method: This is another biological method for wastewater treatment. The combination of two Latin words―plant and remedy―gave rise to the term phytoremediation. The plant, plant origin microbes, or associated microbiota are used to take up the contamination from soil or water.
Why do aerobic microorganisms need oxygen?
Aerobic microorganisms require oxygen to support their metabolic activity. In effluent treatment, oxygen is supplied to the effluent in the form of air by special aeration equipment. Bacteria use dissolved oxygen to convert organic components into carbon dioxide and biomass.
How is phytoremediation achieved?
The remediation is achieved either by retaining, elimination, or degradation in a natural way as it happens in an ecosystem. Phytoremediation is a cheaper, eco-friendly, and feasibly sustainable method for removal of dye pollutants. Moreover, the process requires little nutrient cost and also has aesthetic demand.
How is oxygen supplied to wastewater?
In conventional aerobic biological wastewater treatment processes, oxygen is usually supplied as atmospheric air, either via immersed air-bubble diffusers or surface aeration. Diffused air bubbles (via fine-bubble aeration) are added to the bulk liquid (as in an ASP, biological aerated filters (BAFs), fluidised bioreactors, etc.), or oxygen transfer occurs from the surrounding air to the bulk liquid via a liquid/air interface (as for a TF or rotating biological contactor (RBC)).
How does biogas replace fossil fuels?
In its function as a regenerative energy carrier, biogas replaces fossil fuels in the generation of process steam, heat, and electricity. The composition and quality of biogas depend on both effluent properties and process conditions such as temperature, retention time, and volume load.
What is biological wastewater treatment?
Biological wastewater treatment entails the use of an active microbial biomass to degrade soluble organic carbon, nitrogen, and phosphorus compounds in a manner that sustains the growth of the biomass.
What chapter does nutrient dosing in wastewater treatment?
Chapter 3, Reactivating Bacterial Community and Biochemical Events, demonstrated the nutrient exhaustion inside a bioreactor-based treatment process, and in Chapter 4 , Dosing With Product From the Waste: Use of Fractionsm we discussed in detail nutrient dosing. The reactivation of a nutrient exhausted bioreactor by nutrient dosing would be not only an eventual requirement, but also would arguably be the best possible method to improve the bioreactor’s performance.
How is oxygen supplied to wastewater?
In conventional aerobic biological wastewater treatment processes, oxygen is usually supplied as atmospheric air, either via immersed air-bubble diffusers or surface aeration. Diffused air bubbles (via fine bubble aeration) are delivered to the bulk liquid (as in an ASP, a biological/submerged aerated filter (BAF/SAF), fluidized bioreactors, etc.), or oxygen transfer occurs from the surrounding air to the bulk liquid via a liquid/air interface (as for a TF or a rotating biological contactor (RBC)).
What do thriving microbial assemblages feed on?
The thriving microbial assemblages feed on the root exudates for their metabolism and favor microbial oxidation of the azo dye’s reduced products that fasten their mineralization. The plants uptake some of the reduced and simplified products of dye, produced in the anaerobic region, for their growth.
When was the anaerobic filter invented?
Introduced by Coulter et al. in 1957 and developed by Young and McCarty in 1967, the anaerobic filter is a fixed-film biological wastewater treatment process in which a fixed matrix (support medium) provides an attachment surface that supports the anaerobic microorganisms in the form of a biofilm.
What are the two main types of wastewater treatment?
There are two main types of wastewater treatment: primary and secondary. Primary treatment is a fairly basic process that is used to remove suspended solid waste and reduce its biochemical oxygen demand in order to increase dissolved oxygen in the water.
Why is wastewater sent through a tertiary treatment?
Because all of the contaminants have not been removed , the wastewater is usually sent through a tertiary treatment process after the biological treatment. During this stage, heavy metals, nutrients, and other impurities are removed from the wastewater.
What is anoxic treatment?
Anoxic treatments help remove nitrates and nitrites, selenates and selenites, and sulfates from the wastewater. People are seeing this more in areas where nitrates and sulfates are a concern. It’s the best way to remove as many of them as possible. Anoxic treatments work without adding additional chemicals.
Why is aeration needed in wastewater treatment?
Aeration is needed to oxygenate the wastewater through the use of mixers and aerators. Aerobic treatments work faster and result in cleaner water than anaerobic treatments, which is why they are preferred. The most popular aerobic treatment is the activated sludge process.
How does aerated lagoon work?
Some facilities use aerated lagoons as opposed to the activated sludge process. With this method, the wastewater sits in a treatment pond, where it is mechanically aerated. Pumping oxygen into the pond will increase microbial growth and speed up the decomposition of organic matter.
What is the best way to treat wastewater?
The activated sludge process is one of the most efficient ways to biologically treat wastewater and it’s effective. Another popular aerobic treatment is the trickling filter process. During the trickling filter process, wastewater flows over a bed of rocks, gravel, ceramic, peat moss, coconut fibers, or plastic.
Why is industrial wastewater important?
Even industrial wastewater is going to contain contaminants. It’s important to properly clean water before releasing it into natural water sources. Too much phosphorus can cause algae blooms to take over the lake or pond. Algae will end up depleting the stores of oxygen fish and other aquatic creatures rely on.
How does biological treatment reduce contaminant in water?
As contaminated water flows through the bed, the bacteria, in combination with an electron donor and nutrients, react with contaminants to produce biomass and other non-toxic by-products. In this way, the biological treatment chemically “reduces” the contaminant in the water.
What is an active bioreactor?
An active bioreactor will have a continuous growth of biomass that needs to be periodically removed. Although the excess biomass will not be contaminant-laden, it still requires disposal. Also, biological treatment adds soluble microbial organic products and can deplete the oxygen in treated water.
What is the WBS model?
The work breakdown structure ( WBS) model for MSBA includes standard designs for the treatment of a number of contaminants , including various VOCs. However, the WBS model can be used to estimate the cost of MSBA treatment for removal of other volatile contaminants as well.
What is PTA in water?
Packed tower aeration (PTA) uses towers filled with a packing media designed to mechanically increase the area of water exposed to non-contaminated air. Water falls from the top of the tower through the packing media while a blower forces air upwards through the tower.
What is granular activated carbon?
Granular activated carbon (GAC) is a porous adsorption media with extremely high internal surface area. GACs are manufactured from a variety of raw materials with porous structures including: Physical and/or chemical manufacturing processes are applied to these raw materials to create and/or enlarge pores.
What is the process of water passing through a semi-permeable membrane?
These processes force water at high pressure through semi-permeable membranes that prevent the passage of various substances depending on their molecular weight. Treated water, also known as permeate or product water, is the portion of flow that passes through the membrane along with lower molecular weight substances.
Does RO treatment reduce pH?
Also, the high pressures used in these treatment processes can result in significant energy consumption. Pre-treatment processes are frequently required to prevent membrane fouling or plugging. Finally, RO can lower the pH of treated water and, therefore, may require post-treatment corrosion control.
