ROLE OF MOVING BED BIOFILM REACTOR AND SEQUENCING BATCH REACTOR IN BIOLOGICAL DEGRADATION OF FORMALDEHYDE WASTEWATER

Nowadays formaldehyde is used as raw material in many industries. It has also disinfection applications in some public places. Due to its toxicity for microorganisms, chemical or anaerobic biological methods are applied for treating wastewater containing formaldehyde.In this research, formaldehyde removal efficiencies of aerobic biological treatment systems including moving bed biofilm (MMBR) and sequencing batch reactors (SBR) were investigated. During all experiments, the efficiency of SBR was more than MBBR, but the difference was not significant statistically. According to the results, the best efficiencies were obtained for influent formaldehyde COD of 200 mg/L in MBBR and SBR which were 93% and 99.4%, respectively. The systems were also capable to treat higher formaldehyde concentrations (up to 2500 mg/L) with lower removal efficiency. The reaction kinetics followed the Stover-Kincannon second order model. The gram-positive and gram-negative bacillus and coccus as well as the gram-positive binary bacillus were found to be the most dominant species. The results of 13C-NMR analysis have shown that formaldehyde and urea were converted into N-{[(aminocarbonyl) amino] methyl}urea and the residual formaldehyde was polymerized at room temperature.