The treatment of waste-air containing mixed solvent using a biofilter: 1. Transient behavior of biofilter to treat waste-air containing ethanol

Transient behavior of a biofilter packed with mixed media (of granular activated carbon and compost) inoculated with a pure culture ofPseudomonas putida was observed at the height of each sampling port to treat wasteair containing ethanol. In addition, flooding effects of an excess supply of buffer solution was observed at each sampling port of the biofilter until it recovered the status prior to the flooding. Unlike previous investigations, various process conditions were applied to successive biofilter runs in order to monitor the corresponding unsteady behavior of the biofilter in this work. In early stage of biofilter run the removal efficiency of ethanol maintained almost 100%. However, it began to decrease when inlet load surpassed 100 g/m³/h consistent with maximum elimination capacity. At the end of biofilter-run removal efficiency was decreased and maintained at 40%. The results of this work were compared to those of such biofiltration studies as the work of Christen et al. from the point of view that pure cultures of microorganism were used in both works. Except for the period of flooding effect of the 2nd stage, the inlet load and removal efficiency continued at 105.5 g/m³/h and 95%, respectively, while they were 93.7 g/m³/h and 95%, respectively, according to the result of Christine et al. Removal efficiency remained at 90% for the beginning period of 3 days of the 3rd stage, and it gradually decreased to 60% for remaining 5 days of the stage with an inlet load of 158.26 g/m³/h, which may be interpreted as better than the result of Christine et al. Their result was that the removal efficiency on the inlet load of 154 g/m³/h of ethanol was continued to be 60% for 6 days of a separate biofilter run and decreased to 40% later. Thus, with similar inlet loads of ethanol, removal efficiency of this work was equivalent to or higher than that of Christine et al.     

Transient behavior of biofilter inoculated with Thiobacillus sp. IW to treat waste-air containing hydrogen sulfide

Hydrogen sulfide is heavier than air and is colorless, toxic and flammable, the gas odor threshold of which is about 0.47 ppbv, which causes nuisance odor at concentrations as low as about 8ppbv and corrosion problems in sewer systems. The transient behavior of biofilter packed with mixed media (of granular activated carbon and compost) inoculated with a pure culture of Thiobacillus sp. IW was observed at a height of four sampling ports to treat wasteair containing hydrogen sulfide in this investigation, which shall be used as control to be compared with the performance of a biofilter-involved integrated system for the treatment of waste-air containing hydrogen sulfide in a subsequent investigation. Unlike the previous studies of the other investigators, various process conditions were applied to successive biofilter runs in order to monitor and correlate each corresponding unsteady behavior of the biofilter at the height of each sampling port. During 10 days (20 times) after start-up of a biofilter hydrogen sulfide was continuously adsorbed on the media and that the adsorption of hydrogen sulfide was under way since the inlet loads of 1st and 2nd stage operations were very low. Afterwards it was obvious that the breakthrough curves at the 1st, 2nd, 3rd and 4th (exit) sampling ports responded rapidly to the change of operating conditions of a biofilter so that the breakthrough curve at each sampling port responded rapidly to approach a new state of saturation, which suggests that the adsorption capacity of biofilter-media may be relatively small or its affinity to hydrogen sulfide may be relatively high, compared to such volatile organic compound as ethanol. Up to the 3rd stage of operation the removal efficiency continued to be nearly 100%. However it began to decrease as inlet load increased. At the end of last stage of the biofilterrun removal efficiency was decreased and maintained at 94%. The maximum elimination capacity was observed to be ca. 95 g/m³/h, which was higher than that of the biofiltration-work of any other previous investigator except for that of the biofiltration-work with use of each of two inorganic packing materials (porous ceramics, calcinated and formed obsidian).     

Numerical and experimental study on the biofiltration of toluene vapor

We have solved both steady state and transient problems on the biofiltration of toluene vapor. The effect of inlet toluene concentration and inlet gas-flow rate on the removal rate of toluene and the elimination capacity of a lab-scale biofilter has been investigated. In this study, the effectiveness factor was a function of pollutant concentration. The dynamic solutions show good agreement with experimental results. At an inlet toluene concentration of 100 ppm, the diffusion of toluene into biofilm was obviously a rate determining step. Above 200 ppm, however, biofilm already showed full activity. The steady-state simulation confirmed that the change of elimination capacity obtained by increasing only inlet toluene concentration was the same as that obtained by increasing only flow rate of contaminated air. The maximum possible performance is about 20 g/m³h with no addition of nutrients.     

The treatment of waste-air containing mixed solvent using a biofilter 2. Treatment of waste-air containing ethanol and toluene in a biofilter

An experiment for five stages of a biofilter-run was performed to investigate the effect of hydrophilic ethanol and hydrophobic toluene on the biodegradation of hydrophobic toluene and hydrophilic ethanol, respectively, when waste-air containing toluene and ethanol was treated by a biofilter. Removal efficiencies of toluene and ethanol began to decrease when inlet load surpassed 90 g/m³/h and 100 g/m³/h consistent with maximum elimination capacities of toluene and ethanol, respectively. At the end of the biofilter-run, removal efficiencies for toluene and ethanol were decreased and maintained at 65% and 40%, respectively. The concentration of toluene at 1st sampling port was raised by factor of two in the 3rd stage of the biofilter run when the inlet load of ethanol co-feed was increased by 1.5 times, while the process conditions of toluene were maintained the same as those of the 2nd stage of biofilter-run. According to the result of Mohseni and Allen, it may be interpreted that removal efficiency of hydrophobic toluene was affected by the presence of hydrophilic ethanol when high load of hydrophobic toluene was applied like that of the 1st sampling port of the biofilter. However it was not the case when a low load of hydrophobic toluene was applied like those of the 2nd, 3rd and 4th sampling ports since hydrophobicity of toluene is much less that of α-pinene. Thus, it may be suggested that biodegradation of hydrophobic VOC was interfered by hydrophilic VOC dissolved in the biolayer and the degree of interference was proportional to the inlet load of hydrophobic VOC as well as that of hydrophilic VOC and was inversely proportional to the solubility of hydrophobic VOC. However, it was inferred that the existence of hydrophobic toluene from waste-air can hardly inversely hinder the removal of hydrophilic ethanol in the biofilter when timeevolutions of hydrophilic ethanol concentrations of this experiment were compared with those of the previous experiment of biofilter to treat waste-air containing ethanol only.     

A hybrid system of heuristics and simulated annealing for large size scheduling problems of batch processes with pipeless intermediate storage

This paper describes a new scheduling solution for large number multi-product batch processes with complex intermediate storage system. Recently many batch chemical industries have turned their attention to a more efficient system known as a pipeless batch system. But existing plants need to change their systems to pipeless systems, piece by piece. In this case, current systems are changed to pipeless systems by way of non critical process operations such as through the use of intermediate storage. We have taken the conventional batch plant with a pipeless storage system as an objective process. Although the operation of a pipeless storage system becomes more complex, its efficiency is very high. With this system, all of the storage should be commonly used by any batch unit. For this reason, solving the optimal scheduling problem of this system with a mathematical method is very difficult. Despite the attempts of many previous researches, there has been no contribution which solves the scheduling of intermediate storage for complex batch processes. In this paper, we have developed a hybrid system of heuristics and Simulated Annealing (SA) for large multi-product processes using a pipeless storage system. The results of this study show that the performance and computational time of this method are superior to that of SA and Rapid Access Extensive Search (RAES) methods.