In 1918, Ardern and Lockett in Manchester obtained a patent entitled ‘Sewage
Treatment Without Filters’ for a technology developed at Davyhulme STW. Since
then, the activated sludge process has come to dominate wastewater treatment.
Despite the long history and a reputation as a well-understood and reliable
process, most surveys of activated-sludge plants show that at least half of
the facilities have some form of operational deficiency, mostly associated with
the clarifier – loss of solids through insufficient sludge settleability, bulking
or foaming.
Low-profile STWs
The BAF process is thus much more compact than conventional treatment technologies,
making it easier to integrate it into small sites, which is especially useful
for plant upgrading and extension. But the small footprint also allowed a new
concept in wastewater treatment, locating plants underground or, for sensitive
locations, in small buildings not readily recognisable as STWs. All environmental
nuisances could be contained.
The first large-scale use of the BAF process was in Soissons, France in 1982.
Since then around ten companies have developed full-scale BAF technologies,
with designs which differ in a number of areas:
- direction of water flow – up-flow versus down-flow,
- media density – higher or lower than water, differing grain size and surface
characteristics,
- direction of backwash – counter or co-current, use of air/water, rates and
frequency,
- differing hydraulic and volumetric loading rates,
- process air flow rate, distribution and control.
The first generation BAF, named Biocarbone, used heavy media in a down-flow
configuration and was mainly used in France for BOD oxidation. As demand shifted
towards nitrogen removal, this process was slowly phased out. In ten years of
application at 100 plants worldwide the process treated a population equivalent
(PE) of 1M.
A competing system, Biofor, developed in France, also used a sunken media but
in an up-flow mode. It is widely used today after having passed the 100 references
mark, mainly in much larger plants in Scandinavia, Germany and the UK. The process
has served a PE of more than 10M, with peak flows of up to 600,000m³/d
at the largest plants in Koeln-Stammheim and Frankfurt.
More recently, BAFs have been developed specifically for nitrogen removal,
where the principle of fixed bacteria caters especially well with the slow-growing
nitrifying organisms. Two new developments made these reactors better suited
to the high velocities often associated with low-nitrogen residuals as a result
of nitrate recycling or tertiary applications:
- floating filters using lightweight plastic media, first demonstrated in the
late 1980s,
- larger media or open structures used in the later half of the 1990s.
The Biostyr process, introduced in 1990, uses expanded polystyrene beads as
filter media. About 50 Biostyr plants are either in operation, under construction,
being designed or firmly on the order books. Recent contracts for large plants
of more than 500,000 PE in cities such as Rome, Lisbon, Paris, Toulouse, Geneva,
Bern and Helsinki, have pushed the total population served to more than 10M.
Ironically, the largest plant now operating is Manchester-Davyhulme STW, bringing
sewage treatment with filters back to the site where Ardern and Locketts first
went ‘filter-less’ 80 years ago. The first stone of a similar sized plant has
just been laid in Syracuse, New York, where a peak flow close to 500,000m³/d
is expected.
Another upflow floating filter, Biobead, was launched in the early 1990s in
the UK. The process uses recycled plastic media, slightly less dense than water,
allowing simplified backwash by bed agitation. Today, a PE of more than 1M is
treated by 30 plants using these filters, the largest being in Yorkshire, which
is designed for a peak flow close to 150,000m³/d.
Also located in Yorkshire, with a peak flow of 100,000m³/d, is the largest
in a series of 35 STWs serving a population of almost 4M. This reference list
was recently consolidated by the Austrian Biopur conglomerate which combines
a German technology using granular sunken media and a Swiss process using open
plastic structures.
The latest addition to the BAF family reverts to the traditional trickling
filter principle, using larger media but aerating and submersing the bed and
combining it with a tertiary downstream biofilter. While the filter is used
in more than 50 plants for denitrification, the submerged aerated filter currently
has only a handful of applications. Yet, because of its simplicity, without
backwash, this process is rapidly gaining acceptance for larger plants. Again
in Yorkshire, a plant with a peak flow above 120,000m³/d has been operating for
more than a year.
As at the beginning of the century, the north of England is today a focal point
for the application of modern wastewater technologies. Large BAF reactors have
proliferated there, with Manchester and Liverpool boasting some of the largest
works and Yorkshire offering the base for three different types of technology.
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