Design of Supporting Media for Growth of Biofilm in Treating Industrial Wastewater

Background/Objectives: Effective waste water treatment is needed to prevent water pollution worsening. Waste water treatment can be divided into three types, namely, treatment of physical, chemical and biological. The main goal of this scientific project is to design media support for growth of biofilm in treating industrial wastewater of pulp and paper mill. Methods/Statistical Analysis: Thus, the designed media is then to be compared with plastic media in term of their performance in wastewater treatment. Through AutoCAD 2012 software developed by the company Autodesk, the design for media support for biofilm has produced. In this scientific project, the type of treatment used is a biological waste water treatment for the Sequencing Batch Reactor (SBR) system. In addition, the pH is also maintained in the range of pH 6-9 for the development of growth and reproduction of bacteria can be maximized. SBR process used in scientific project consists of four phases: namely filling, reaction, settling and production. Findings: Wastewater treatment performance comparisons have been made by comparing the performance of the media that are designed with the existing plastic media. The performance of reducing Chemical Oxygen Demand (COD), removal of ammonia nitrogen and analysis of pH and dissolved oxygen is compared between both biofilm media. Through this scientific research projects, the results of the experiment showed that the biomass produced in both reactors containing the respective media support is 771 mg/L for the media hexafilter and 700 mg/L for commercial media after the performance of the wastewater treatment process. In addition, 40.6% removal of ammonia-nitrogen is recorded in reactor containing the media hexafilter has been achieved while the reactor containing a commercial media reaches ammonia-nitrogen removal percentage of 43.6%. The experimental results also showed that in the HRT of 24 hours, the percentage of COD in the reactor containing hexafilter reach up to 67.6% removal of COD compared with commercial media, which recorded the percentage removal of COD at 63%. Moreover, the trend of pH and DO profile is maintained at optimum conditions in both reactors when the pH is in the range of 6.5-7.5, while the average reading for DO for the reactor containing hexafilter is 6.82 mg/L while the commercial media reactor is 6.78 mg/L. Application/Improvements: In comparison between supporting media designed with commercial media, which shows through the experimental results of this scientific project, hexafilter is more effective in wastewater treatment and experimental performance can be compared with existing commercial media.