Total organic carbon as a predictor of biological wastewater treatment efficiency and kinetic reaction rates

Abstract

The study investigated the use of Total Organic Carbon (TOC) to predict the efficiency of removal of a high strength wastewater and to obtain information about the kinetic processes in the rotating biological contactor system. For the determination of efficiency of removal, standard TOC analysis was used, and the results compared with those of the more usual BOD and COD tests. For the determination of the order of reaction, TOC alone was used. The results indicated that, for the high strength food processing wastewater being treated, the use of TOC gave excellent correlations between efficiency of removal and input parameters such as initial concentration, hydraulic loading rate and applied organic loading rate. The use of TOC also gave very high statistical correlations leading to an overall value for the order of reaction for the rotating biological contactor which agreed with previous research results. However, the value obtained for the order of the reaction was very dependent on the values of the input parameters which partly could be construed as showing evidence for the change from approximately first order to near zero order of reaction depending upon the input parameters.