While water consumption increases steadily due to various socio-economic factors such as population concentration in cities, increase in industrial wastewater along with the rapid development of industry and the improvement of people’s living and cultural level, a large amount of water resources are contaminated, so it is vital to increase the amount and efficiency of wastewater treatment at sewage treatment plants.
The trend in the development of global wastewater treatment processes is the introduction of a large number of aeration facilities that provide biochemical oxidation of organic pollutants to the plant. The problem is that with the increase of sewage treatment plants, its operating cost, especially the power consumption of the fan, increases. Aeration is one of the most energy-intensive processes in the wastewater treatment plants and any improvement in it is likely to enhance the efficiency of the overall process.
Of course, 15~20% of electric power consumption can be reduced by controlling the blast volume according to the influx of sewage and its composition, but upgrading of the aerating facilities for improvement of the oxidation effect is more stable and effective.
Ji Chol Hyok, a researcher at the Nano Physics Engineering Institute, has proposed a sewage clarification method by micro-bubble aeration for improving the clarification efficiency and reducing its cost, and compared its effectiveness with conventional ones, thus demonstrating its superiority.
He chose an 80㎥ tank of a pig farm as an experimental reaction tank and measured some sewage treatment parameters.
The results showed that the proposed method ensured up to 90.8% of removal efficiency of COD (chemical oxygen demand) while the conventional ones guaranteed only 86.4%, and that the overall removal efficiency is over 20% higher than bottom aeration when the temperature is low.
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