Abstract
Methanogenic, fluidized-bed biofilm reactors having a granular activated carbon (GAC) medium are fed continuously with milk colloids. Steady state results for increasing loads of chemical oxygen demand (COD) show that the removal efficiency for influent colloids increased as the amount of attached biofilm increased due to the higher COD loading. Short-term filtration experiments using small-scale, once-through columns are used to assess the cohesion efficiency (α\N) for GAC samples taken from the biofilm reactor. GAC with the highest amount of biomass, 1.74 mg cellular carbohydrate per gram of dry carbon, has a much higher cohesion coefficient (α\N = 0.90 on average) than does GAC with no biomass (α\N = 0.00) and GAC with 0.134 mg cellular carbohydrate per gram of dry carbon (α\N = 0.21). Thus, the increased accumulation of biofilm dramatically improves the cohesion of the milk colloids.
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