Possibilities for detection of the change of biodegradability of wastewater by dielectric constant measurements

Abstract

Nowadays, the development of rapid and non-destructive measurement methods have high importance. The dielectric measurement is a promising technique to detect the chemical and physicho-chemical change of different materials. The dielectric behavior of pure water is widely investigated for decades, but there is very few information available related to the dielectric parameters of wastewater. Our study aims to investigate the applicability of dielectric measurements for the detection of the change of biodegradability of wastewater. In the experiments the change of organic matter solubility and biodegradability of sugar beet processing wastewater, meat processing wastewater, dairy industry wastewater and municipal wastewater was examined. Our results show that dielectric constant - measured at the frequency of 2400 MHz - has a strong linear correlation with the soluble chemical oxygen demand (SCOD), which makes possible the fast detection of disintegration efficiency of different wastewater and sludge treatment processes, or the organic matter removal efficiency of wastewater purification technologies. Furthermore, our results verified that the change of aerobic biodegradability (expressed in BOD5/SCOD ratio) show also good linear correlation with the dielectric constant. These preliminary results enable to develop a dielectric behavior based detection method for the estimation of the efficiency of wastewater treatment processes.