Chapter 20 - Monitoring of anaerobic biological processes

Abstract

Anaerobic biological treatment technology has been widely used in wastewater treatment plants. However, the anaerobic process may suffer from process instability, resulting in decays in wastewater treatment efficiency and biogas production. To maintain the stability and efficiency of processing, process diagnosis has become the primary task of operation management. Due to the diversity of anaerobic processes and the complexity of wastewater, each indicator has its particular application conditions, and none of the monitoring methods can encompass all processes. Therefore this chapter devotes to summarize the development of early warning indicators and associated monitoring tools in the process monitoring system. Generally, process monitoring mainly focuses on monitoring the metabolic variables of the anaerobic technology itself, in which volatile fatty acids and biogas composition can be recognized as major early warning indicators to diagnose the anaerobic process. However, in order to shorten the monitoring time and labor costs, intensive experiments turn to the development of fast and accurate online monitoring systems. In addition, monitoring microbial indicators through molecular biotechnology seems to be a more promising means in the prediction of operating efficiency. This work may shed light on the regulation and optimization of the anaerobic process, thereby improving wastewater treatment and energy recovery efficiency.