Evaluation of Biological Trickling Filter Performance for Graywater Treatment in ALS Systems Conference Paper uri icon

abstract

  • The Bioregenerative Air Treatment for Health system has been proposed for Advanced Life Support (ALS) planetary base applications. The system will be operated as a biotrickling filter to simultaneously treat graywater and waste gas. Preliminary experiments have focused on carbon removal from a graywater simulant. Six bench scale biotrickling filter reactors were constructed and monitored continuously. After a reactor startup phase of 40 days, the average total organic carbon (TOC) removal for reactors packed with Tri-packs packing material was 62%. A second set of experiments was designed to evaluate TOC removal using different packing materials (Bee-cell and Biobale). It was hypothesized that the alternative packing materials would reduce the effects of channeling in the reactors, thus improving TOC removal. However, TOC removal did not significantly improve during the second set of experiments. Of note is that start-up performance was higher in reactors packed with Tri-packs than other reactors. These results indicate that selection of packing material may be an important design parameter for reduction of reactor start-up period and associated off-line time. Copyright 2005 SAE International.

name of conference

  • SAE Technical Paper Series

published proceedings

  • SAE Technical Papers

author list (cited authors)

  • Sharvelle, S. A., Banks, M. K., McLamore, E., Kim, Y. S., & Clark, S.

citation count

  • 5

complete list of authors

  • Sharvelle, Sybil A||Banks, MK||McLamore, Eric||Kim, Yong Sang||Clark, Stephen

publication date

  • December 2005