Municipal wastewater treatment with corrugated PVC carrier anaerobic baffled reactor


 Anaerobic baffled reactor (ABR) is a promising solution for decentralized wastewatertreatment due to its low operation cost as compared to activated sludge process, but itrequires comparatively higher hydraulic retention time (HRT). This ultimately increasesland requirement, capital and construction cost of treatment plant. This studyinvestigates performance of ABR using polyvinyl chloride (PVC) corrugated pipe ascarrier media to improve biomass retention capacity and treatment performance ofreactor with the aim to reduce HRT. Comparative performance of two ABRs with andwithout carrier media was analyzed under mesophilic conditions (35 ± 1 °C) for organicsand TSS removal at HRTs of 24, 18, 12, 8, 6 and 4 h. Results showed that at HRTs of 24–08 h, organics removal performance of carrier anaerobic baffled reactor (CABR)was better than ABR and was in the range of 77–81% for CABR as compared to 64–70% for ABR. However, further decrease in HRT to 6 h, CABR sustained thetreatment with organics removal of 80% while ABR performance reduced to 58%creating a performance difference of 38%. Therefore, this study identified CABR withPVC carrier media as an effective low-HRT reactor for organics and SS removal withless land area requirement.