Phenol degradation using a membrane biofilm reactor

Abstract

The concept of extractive membrane bioreactors for waste water treatment is well known, e.g., dissolved organic contaminants can diffuse from a waste stream across a hydrophobic semi-permeable membrane to be metabolized by the microbial culture in a separate aqueous cell growth environment. The performance of a continuously operated laboratory scale membrane reactor in which phenol is continuously removed from an aqueous feed and the biofilm is formed by a pure culture of a Pseudomonas sp. was presented. The membrane is a single silicon rubber tube, which offers significant resistance to mass transfer of phenol and thus essentially determines the mass transfer coefficient. Continuous operation of > 100 days was successfully achieved with little or no significant fall in the effective mass transfer coefficient for phenol transfer across the membrane. The phenol concentration in the feed solution was increased intermittently during the operation to reach a level of 5000 ppm without deterioration in system performance. Continuous complete degradation of the transferred phenol was achieved. This is an abstract of a paper presented at the 7th World Congress of Chemical Engineering (Glasgow, Scotland 7/10-14/2005).