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Go to Editorial ManagerFluidized bed reactor (FBR) is an attached growth system used mainly for biological treatment of industrial wastewater of high organic content. These wastewaters are usually resulted from refineries and milk, starch, and olive oil industries. The objective of this study is to investigate the use of fluidized bed reactor for treating sanitary sewage. The study was accomplished using a pilot plant of the FBR. The pilot plant was constructed and installed in Hamdan Sewage Treatment Plant in Basrah governorate. That was to maintain continuous source of settled sewage which is the influent to the FBR. The period of plant operation was nine weeks. During, this period, the plant was operated at three phases of different conditions (up flow velocity and recirculation ratio). To study the performance of FBR, the main measured parameters were; BOD, DO, VSS, pH, and temperature. The most important conclusions of this study are; (1) the maximum efficiency of BOD removal is 78.6% which was obtained for hydraulic retention time (HRT) of 24min and upflow velocity of 1.59m/min, (2) the effluent BOD values during phases-1 and 2 of plant operation match that of stabilization ponds and trickling filters and during phase-3 matches that activated sludge process, (3) during all operation phases, the values of effluent pH are within the limits specified in national standards of secondary effluents, (4) as F/M increases, the efficiency of BOD removal decreases and the maximum efficiency of BOD removal (78.6%) was obtained at F/M ratio equals 23.47 day -1 , and (5) the HRT of fluidized bed reactor is on order of minutes, while, the values of HRT of activated sludge systems and stabilization ponds are on order of hours and days, respectively.
Flocculation process is used to agglomerate colloids to form large and heavy flocs. It is accomplished using mechanical or hydraulic slow mixing. The hydraulic mixing is usually achieved using baffles. The aim of this study is to conduct experimental work to study the effect of baffles shape and configuration on baffled flocculator performance. The work includes 304 experiments conducted in a pilot plant of baffled flocculator. Two arrangements of three baffle shapes (blind baffles, baffles of rectangular slot and baffles of circular slots) were adopted. During each experiment, water turbidity and temperature, influent flow rate and head loss were measured. The main outcomes of this study are; (1) for all baffle types and arrangements, flocculation efficiency (FE) increases with the increase of velocity gradient (G) till it reaches a maximum value, then, it decreases and the G value which produces the maximum FE varies with detention time (t), (2) within the applied range of Gt values (10231-25304), the correlation between FE and Gt is weak to moderate positive and varied according to baffles type and arrangement, (3) within the applied range of initial water turbidity (IWT) values (18.1-196) NTU, the correlation between FE and IWT is weak positive to good positive represented by logarithmic relationship, and (4) within the implemented baffle types, the blind baffles type gives the highest FE values for all the baffles number as compared with the other baffle types. Also, the most frequent head loss coefficient values were obtained.