Iranian Journal of

Backgrounds and Objectives : Nitrogen compounds in wastewater are mainly in four types of organic, am- monia, nitrite and nitrate. Total nitrogen concentration in municipal wastewater is usually within 25 to 45 mg/L as nitrogen. The most important problem with nitrogen is its oxygen demand and human health effect.
Materials and Methods: Anaerobic Baffled Reactor (ABR) is a system in which baffles are used to direct  wastewater flow. During 9 months study, a 15 liter modified ABR (104*30*15 cm) with eight baffled com- partments was used for nitrification-denitrification processes. In the seventh compartment, the wastewater was aerated to oxidize ammonia to nitrite and nitrate.
Results : Denitrification was done in the first four compartments with removal efficiency from 60 to 84 per- cent for nitrite and nitrate, respectively. During the shock loading study (4 times of the last influent), a sharp decrease in nitrogen removal rate was observed which was then returned to the previous efficiency after 11 days. Artificial neural network was used to evaluate and process the data in which the observed error in 10 patterns was less than 15 percent.
Conclusion : Anaerobic baffled reactor with an influent of up to 200 mg/L has capability to remove total  nitrogen concentration to less than the standard level of Iranian Department of Environment of 50 mg/L as nitrate and 10 mg/L as nitrogen.

Background and Objective: Being low cost of building and operation, anaerobic baffled reactor is considered superior to aerobic methods of wastewater treatment, especially for small communities. However, it needs to be studded for upgrade and overcome of its limitations. The purpose of this study was to evaluate the performance of FABR and RABR reactors for the municipal wastewater treatment at laboratory scale and in field conditions to determine their optimum conditions in reaching effluent discharge standards.

Materials and Methods: This study was conducted in Khoy wastewater treatment plant. FABR was operated for 267 days with hydraulic retention time of 18-48 h and RABR was operated for 90 days with media bad rotation of 10-50 rpm. The reactors were fed in line from the wastewater canal. Using composite sampling, 224 samples were taken from the inflow and outflow of the reactors and each sample was analyzed for parameters of COD, BOD, TSS, VSS, TKN, and TP.

Results: The reactor startup took about 107 days. FABR removal efficiency was 93-80, 21-10, and 30-21% for COD, TKN, and PO₄ respectively at HRT of 48-18 h. FABR reached effluent disposal standard of TSS, COD, and BOD in all conditions and optimum HRT of 36 h. RABR reached to these standards at HRT 24 h and 50 rpm. However, none of them could meet the nutrient effluent standards.

Conclusion: FABR is an appropriate system for municipal wastewater treatment but for reaching N and P effluent standard, it should be combined with aerobic post-treatment. Moreover, in order to reuse the reactor's nutrient-rich effluent for irrigation; it can be reused as subsurface irrigation.