Presented is a kinetic model simulating the biodegradation of pig abattoir (slaughterhouse) wastewater in a full scale anaerobic treatment plant. High rate anaerobic treatment of these wastes is often complicated by the presence of particulates and fats. The model developed by Costello et al. (1991) for the degradation of soluble carbohydrates and modified by Ramsay et al. (1994) for soluble proteins is further expanded to simulate the solublisation of particles and the biological degradation of fats. This approached proved well suited to describe the full breakdown of the complex component mixture found in such a wastewater.
The model is tuned using one dynamic experimental run and is validated against on two different experimental runs. Agreement between simulation and experimental results is very good on all sets of data. The importance of critical outputs such as gas production and agreement between experimental and simulation results are discussed. It is concluded that the model should be a useful tool for optimal reactor design and operation when encountering difficult wastewaters.
This paper presents a technique for configuring wastewater process simulations so that the hydraulic characteristics are similar to the real plant. Residence time distribution (RTD) tests are performed on two biological nutrient removal pilot plants. The RTD tests proved valuable for evaluating mixing effectiveness, volume utilisation and for determining an appropriate hydraulic topology for the dynamic models of the pilot plants. As a result of this work, simulation execution times became much faster due to a significant reduction in the number of effective stirred tanks required in the model. The work also identified short circuiting and dead zones in the pilot plants.
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