Controlling aerobic biological floc size using Couette-Taylor Bioreactors

Biological floc size is an important reactor microenvironment parameter that is often not experimentally controlled due to a lack of suitable methods. Here, we introduce the Couette-Taylor bioreactor (CTB) as an improved tool for controlling biological floc size, specifically as compared with bubble-column sequencing batch reactors (SBRs). A CTB consists of two concentric walls, either of which may be rotated to induce fluid motion. The induced flow produces hydrodynamic shear which is more uniform than that produced through aeration in SBRs. Because hydrodynamic shear is a major parameter controlling floc size, we hypothesized the ability to better control shear rates within a CTB would enable better-controlled floc sizes. To test this hypothesis, we measured the particle size distributions of activated sludge flocs from CTBs with either inner (iCTB) or outer (oCTB) rotating walls as well as SBRs with varying height to diameter ratios (0.5, 1.1, and 9.4). The rotation speed of the CTBs and aeration rate of the SBRs were varied to produce predicted mean shear rates from 25 to 250 s^-1. Further, the shear rate distributions for each experiment were estimated using computational fluid dynamics (CFD). In all SBR experiments, the floc distributions did not significantly vary with shear rate or geometry, likely because shear rates (estimated by CFD) differed much less than originally predicted by theory. In the CTB experiments, the mean particle size decreased proportionally with increased hydrodynamic shear, and iCTBs produced particle size distributions with smaller coefficients of variation than oCTBs (0.3 vs. 0.5-0.7, respectively).