Short Time BOD Analyser

Abstract

Wastewater treatment is a huge industry worldwide dealing with about billions of litres of wastewater. Despite the massive capital and operating costs, only a relatively small amount of R&D investment is made. This might have been related to the limited demands in terms of effluent quality in the past, but today’s environmental awareness requires much stricter effluent standards to be achieved. This in turn should give sufficient incentives, together with the possible large cost savings, to increase the R&D activities in this field. There are certainly significant knowledge gaps to be filled and substantial benefits could be gained from this. Respirometry is a scientific method of communication with microbial communities, a technology that monitors and measures the respiration rate of microorganisms This project describes the importance of respirometry as a process control and operating tool. The project will include real case studies that show its application and propose simple but effective use of the parameter for process control. Respirometry was recognised many years ago as being a key parameter for process control, since it represented a direct measure of the viability and activity of the biological organisms. However, no really usable instrument was available until the early 1990’s. Many instrument manufacturers have marketed respirometers for many years throughout the world but even today these are still very much designed for laboratory use and require a considerable technician involvement to keep them operational. Biological Oxygen Demand is an important parameter in water resource management. It determines the quality of water and the purification power of biological wastewater treatment stages. BOD measurement is routinely used to check the wastewater in the inflow and discharge of sewage treatment plants. By performing experiments on canteen waste and fertilizer industry waste it has been found that it is possible to develop a correlation between BOD5 and BODst and thus time for BOD5 measurement would be reduced from days to few hours using respirometry.