Affiliations: Department of Environmental Science and Engineering,
Hunan University, Changsha 410082, China | School of Biotechnology, Wuxi University of Light
Industry, Wuxi 214036, China
Abstract: The high strength easily biodegradable pollutants(represented by
COD_E) are strong inhibitors of terephthalic acid(TA) anaerobic biodegradation.
At the same time, TA can inhibit easily biodegradable pollutants removal under
anaerobic conditions to a limited extent. This mutual inhibition could happen
and cause a low removal efficiency of both TA and CODE, when the effluent from
TA workshops containing TA and easily biodegradable pollutants are treated by a
single anaerobic reactor system. Based upon the treatment kinetics analysis of
both TA degradation and COD_E removal, a two-stage up-flow anaerobic sludge
blanket and up-flow fixed film reactor(UASB-UAFF) system for dealing with this
kind of wastewater was developed and run successfully at laboratory scale. An
UASB reactor with the methanogenic consortium as the first stage removes the
easily biodegradable pollutants(COD_E). An UAFF reactor as the second stage is
mainly in charge of TA degradation. At a COD_E loading of 15.3 g/(L·d)
and a TA loading of 1.4 g/(L·d), HRT 18.5h, the COD_E and TA removal
rate of the system reached 89.2% and 71.6%, respectively.
