CE 521 Environmental Biotechnology

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TERM PAPER ABSTRACTS:

The effluents of many industrial activities such as oil refinery, car industry, metal processing, machinery industry, paper/kraft manufacturing, edible oil industry, some subcategories of textile industry and bilge water from the navigation may contain high concentrations of oil as oil is of concern due to their adverse effects in the environment, such as toxicity to the living organisms.. Increasing volumes of oily wastewater in combination with more stringent environmental standards and limited space availability has promoted the development of new intensive biotechnological processes for oily wastewater treatment, such as membrane technology. Although the existing physicochemical treatment processes and conventional biological wastewater treatment systems could remove most of free and emulsified oil from the wastewater, soluble organic matter is still discharged at high concentrations from the plants as the compounds in oily wastewater are poorly biodegradable under such conditions. The effluents from several membrane filtration techniques such as microfiltration, ultrafiltration, and nanofiltration been used alone to separate the solid/liquid phases still contains some soluble organic matter, which can be hazardous for the environment. The results of the research which are very few and inadequate indicate that aeration basins coupled with membrane filtration units can overcome such problems while having some advantages over conventional biological treatment systems, such as high effluent quality, flexibility in operation, compact plant size, high rate decomposition, low rate sludge reduction, disinfection, and odor control.

Membrane bioreactor, MBR, ultrafiltration, oily wastewater, hydrocarbons, oil and grease, membrane technology.