The upflow anaerobic sludge blanket (UASB) reactor has been used successfully treat a variety of wastewaters. The aim of this review is to synthesize and analyze information on how the process of granulation is affected by environmental and operational conditions in the reactor. The factors reviewed are strength of substrate, nutrients, multivalent cations and heavy metals, exocellular polymer,...

The up flow anaerobic sludge blanket reactor (UASB) has been used successfully treat a variety of wastewaters. The aim of this review is to synthesize and analyze information on how the process of granulation is affected by environmental and operational conditions in the reactor. The factors reviewed are strength of substrate, nutrients, multivalent cations and heavy metals, exocellular polymer...

Permanent magnets with non-uniform magnetic field and an electromagnet with 3–5 mT uniform magnetic field were applied to investigate their effects on both aerobic granulation and COD and ammonium removal in reactors with less than 7% coverage of magnetic field. It was found that both types of magnets had little influence on the granulation speed and the settling ability of granular sludge at t...

Calcium is essential to the growth of several strains of microorganisms involved in anaerobic digestion. It has also been found to be effective in speeding up granulation of anaerobic sludges. But there are reports that the metal can exert a harmful effect on the performance of upflow anaerobic sludge blanket (UASB) reactor by causing the ‘cementing’ of some of the active sludge in the reactor,...

Large volumes of untreated palm oil mill effluent (POME) pose threat to aquatic environment due to the presence of very high organic content. The present investigation involved two pilot-scale anaerobic expanded granular sludge bed (EGSB) reactors, continuously operated for 1 year to treat POME. Setting HRT at 9.8 d, the anaerobic EGSB reactors reduced COD from 71179 mg/L to 12341 mg/L and recy...

This study aimed to develop an aerobic granular sludge process for the efficient treatment of highly saline wastewater and understand the granulation process in a seawater-based multi-ion matrix. Five identical sequencing batch airlift reactors (SBARs) are used to treat synthetic saline sewage with different proportions of real seawater (0%-100%). The results confirm that aerobic granular sludg...

BACKGROUND The aim of this study is to accelerate and improve aerobic granulation within a Sequencing Batch Reactor (SBR) by cationic polymer addition. METHODS To identify whether the polymer additive is capable of enhancing granule formation, two SBRs (R1 and R2, each 0.15 m in diameter and 2 m in height) are used by feeding synthetic wastewater. The cationic polymer with concentration of 30...