A two-stage anaerobic system for biodegrading wastewater containing terephthalic acid and high strength easily...

The high strength easily biodegradable pollutants (represented by CODE) are strong inhibitors of terephthalic acid (TA) anaerobic biodegradation. At the same time, TA can inhibit easily biodegradable pollutants removal under anaerobic conditions to a limited extent. This mutual inhibition could happen and cause a low removal efficiency of both TA and CODE, when the effluent from TA workshops containing TA and easily biodegradable pollutants are treated by a single anaerobic reactor system. Based upon the treatment kinetics analysis of both TA degradation and CODE removal, a two-stage up-flow anaerobic sludge blanket and up-flow fixed film reactor(UASB-UAFF) system for dealing with this kind of wastewater was developed and run successfully at laboratory scale. An UASB reactor with the methanogenic consortium as the first stage removes the easily biodegradable pollutants(CODE). An UAFF reactor as the second stage is mainly in charge of TA degradation. At a CODE loading of 15.3 g/(L.d) and a TA loading of 1.4 g/(L.d), HRT 18.5 h, the CODE and TA removal rate of the system reached 89.2% and 71.6%, respectively.