Installation, Startup and Performance of Up-Flow Anaerobic Fixed Film Fixed Bed Reactor for Oil Refinery Waste Water

An Anaerobic Fixed Film Fixed Bed Reactor (AFFFB) model is installed and studied for treating Oil Refinery Waste Water. Application of anaerobic fixed film fixed bed reactor containing mixed population of bacteria helps in bacterial immobilization of biofilm on a support medium in the reactor which overcomes the problem of biomass washout. Knowledge of hydrodynamics characteristics helps in better understanding and evaluating the performance of any reactor. This paper presents the study of hydraulic retention time (HRT) carried out to investigate the hydrodynamic behavior of AFFFB reactor under the influence of varied hydraulic loading, resulting in range 0.5 days to 5 days. Results have demonstrated that the flow pattern is more close to a plug flow type and vary with varying intensity of dispersion and the extent of dispersion increases with decrease in HRTs. The experiment was conducted for different COD loading and different flow rates. The COD reduction efficiency was observed to be 66.10 percent to 94.13 percent. The evaluated parameters are listed.