Biofiltration Basics Webinar
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Today we will be learning about Biofiltration Basics presented by CECO Environmental. My name is Mary Rusnak and I'm the Marketing Manager for the Industrial Air and Fluid Solutions segment of CECO and with me today is Thomas Brazell, our Director of Product Development and Vern Bueller, Applications Engineer for CECO. While we wait for everyone to join I'd like to go over some basic housekeeping guidance that our platform and also about the pdh certification so just kind of taking a look first of all, if you have any sound issues hopefully you'll be able to read the slide here check your media player make sure that you're not on mute look at the help widget you know see if there's something happening there and then worst case scenario you can always log out and log back in and often about to take care of any issues that you have. As far as the platform goes, at the bottom of your screen are multiple application engagement tools or what I call widgets that you can use throughout the presentation. All the widgets are resizable and movable so feel free to move them around so you get the most out of your desktop space you can expand your slide area make it super large or you can basically you know make it smaller by clicking on the top right corner. If you have any questions during the webcast you can
submit them through the Q/A widget and to keep ourselves on track we're going to answer all the questions at the end but you can basically submit your questions at any point in time if we do not get to your question here during this presentation which is a possibility because we often have quite a few, don't worry about it we will definitely get to you after the presentation and make sure that question is answered. A copy of today's slide deck and additional materials are also available in the resource list we encourage you to download any resources or links that you might find useful and all of these will actually remain available as well on the on-demand version. If you also take a look in the bottom widgets on the bottom you'll see that we have ways you can actually in the resource area I'm sorry if you look we have links to LinkedIn, YouTube, Facebook we post all of our events on these so feel free to follow us there and that way you'll stay on track with everything that we offer. We have several events still here planned through June and then also in the fall again one thing for anyone who's taking the pdh portion and taking the excuse me taking the quiz at the end you're going to want to take a look at the bio filtration summary that might actually help you out there a little bit we're able to offer professional development hours in 36 States right now and as I was talking about the widgets before if you hover over them it'll tell you what they are so feel free to share via social email us if you have any questions and then finally the last two widgets which are probably the most important if you're taking the the quiz at the end so test and the tracker widget the check mark will take you basically the that's where you're going to find out you know you'll find your quiz at the test section and you'll know if you've completed all the requirements at the track care location so just again webinars are bandwidth intent so make sure that you close down any unnecessary tabs this is going to help so that you don't have as much of a lag if you do find that you're behind on any of the slides push F5 on your keyboard and that will actually refresh your page I've also found that Chrome seems to work best here there's also additional answers to common technical issues in the help widget like we discussed before An on-demand version of the webcast will be available active event and can be accessed using the same link that you had before all interactivity remains including the testing capability so for some reason you actually definitely get logged off or you have to leave you can always come back in and fulfill and finish the rest of the presentation So today's webinar is worth one professional development hour or contact hours you must be present for at least 50 minutes of this presentation and you need to complete and pass the test which is basically finishing eight out of ten. Remember those two
widgets I was talking about at the bottom when you're done go to that certification widget and the print certificate box will be available that does not show up until you have actually completed all of the qualifications so make sure that you fulfill everything that you need to then you'll be able to go back there and print it out if at any point in time as well if you can't do that today you can also just log back in and print it out from the on-demand version as well if you have any questions just contact me there's my email you can also use the email with widget at the bottom and that will contact me directly the webinar is one hour long but we're going to keep the platform open for an additional half hour after the event is done to allow people to finish up the quiz and you know print out any materials that they like So in terms of an outline I'm not going to go over all of this but we're really going to talk about what is a biofilter you know what types are out there where are they used what's a good application you know what are some of the design parameters and things that you need to know if you want to use it in your application what does it look like and you know just some basic comparisons to other air abatement technologies that are out there so to kind of determine why this one would actually work for you so we hope you enjoy the presentation and we look forward to giving you this information on this green technology. We're going to start off with a poll question and you'll be able to actually answer the question in the next slide how much experience do you have with biofiltration and there's a couple options there I'm an expert I have some experience a little bit of experience no idea what a biofilter is and this is where you would answer and we'll give everybody a couple seconds okay finish up and let's see what what we have here today in our audience for some reason we're not getting any answers which I don't think is right let's try that one more time and see if it'll freshen up here there we go okay so we have a good portion here that are learning about bio filters for the first time um quite a few have a little experience and then you know we have some that you know have some experience but no experts so I think that you'll get a lot out of this presentation it's definitely geared to giving everyone that basic overview so we're glad you're here and I'm going to pass this on to Thomas who is going to start with our first portion of the presentation all right thanks Mary I appreciate that oh boy I hope we're both clicking okay yeah so that poll results there we go we're a line sorry about that everybody. Yeah the poll results great I'm glad there's no experts here um seems like we have the right group of people that hopefully we can get you guys a little bit of um framework about what a biofiltration system looks like and and how to use them and where you should consider them and so with that let's jump right in. So first question right so in the context of this conversation we're really talking about gas streams airstreams from a process what has some sort of compounds VOC something similar where we want to treat that VOC or the pollutant and how we're going to treat that we're going to treat that with microorganisms in the system to degrade and biooxidize the compounds to make them suitable for mission to the atmosphere and you can think of it two-step process. The first step is transferring the compounds you want to treat into the biofilm where the biology is living and then the second step is the actual bio oxidation that occurs within the biosome and so then we're going to go a lot more detail about what that is and why what part you should care about as an engineer or someone that's involved in one of these systems. So why would we want to use a biofiltration well it's it's a
green technology I'm sure you saw that in Mary's blurb she sent out to everybody and that's we're really excited about it because it is really is a green technology and also green sometimes also means reduced cost in this case and so how do we how are we green how do we reduce costs the first thing a lot of the competing technologies out there for this application we use a lot of energy a lot of times it might be natural gas for example and natural gas has combustion gases right so we might be treating a problem but creating a little bit of this one doesn't do that biofiltration does not create knots it doesn't have a particular output doesn't produce CO it's much more greener in that environment that aspect that energy thing I just talked about also helps with Opex right so we we've spent money to buy a piece of equipment and then we spend money to maintain and operate it so when you compare a biofilter where you don't have to inject natural gas for example that's obviously a cost savings um the pumps the the air system them the Delta P across it typically you'll see less energy and Vern's going to go into more examples of that in the second half of the presentation but often the Opex is lower than other Technologies capex can be lower it really depends on the what your emissions are what your permits are how big your footprint is things like that sometimes it can be a little more sometimes it can be the same we like to say it's less we have the biofilter folks here talking in any case it is it is less typically what are we trying to treat with it organic and inorganic compounds well we're going to give a little more details of what is a good thing to be using a biofilter it's not a it's not a one size fit all you can't treat everything with it just like anything and so we think it's a great thing to know about because it should be in your options when you consider an air abatement technology typically you're going to see biofiltration from the air side in Municipal and Industrial applications a lot of people probably the the people that have a little bit of experience probably knew it from Municipal applications so the context of this we're going to talk mostly about industrial applications although really the fundamentals here carry over to Municipal we have a couple of little Municipal topics sprinkled in here and there if you have more questions specific to that you can certainly put in the Q A as Mary said we might not get to it today but we'll definitely follow up and can answer any of those questions so bio oxidation that's the heart of what biofiltration is right and it's a biological process we're typically treating vocs some some other compounds are also can be considered but really introducing them to a biomatrix and then you capture them there and you digest it and you from this digestion you're turning the exhaust and the carbon dioxide and water vapor to the atmosphere so obviously that's a fine thing to send um compared to a boc and so that's that's the heart of the process you can see this picture on the top right that's kind of the um the chemistry the the biology background of you got the air on the left and you got the biofilm on the right and there's a mass transfer process across that and you're you're solely converting things um and what you don't want to what you want bottom you can see kind of a nice little animation of a of what a system looks like and inside of it you got the microbes right those of you from biology class remember you've got these different microorganisms that consume and eat and do things like that um everyone I think probably realizes that that living things they need they need things to live so you need you need food you need energy sources and you need nutrients right so it's like your yard you go out and put fertilizer in your yard nitrogen phosphorus other minerals you want to make sure you have um all the necessary building blocks for the bio-oxidation to occur um this is where it gets interesting some processes they have a complex stream where they have that really can meet most of those needs and you don't have to do really any or very limited supplements of nutrients and sometimes you have to add a lot of nutrients that's where you do testing and burn again we'll talk about testing and you can figure out what you need to do so that's biooxidation I'm going to show you this next slide so let me let me just quickly say I'm a mechanical engineer I am not a biology person but here's the summary of what's out there right so we have we talked about biology but what is it it's bacteria there's different types of bacteria in this fungi and I think the takeaway here is to really understand that um there's not one size fits all right so if you're trying to get something that's a hydro umphilic compounds it's easy to get into water and you can get into a slime a biofilm then a heterotrophic bacteria might be a great sense but if it's more of a recalcit or a hydro phobic compounds are more complex or challenging to consume it might not have enough time to get into the water might not be practical to make something for scrubbing that's so large so you might use a fungi based approach and the fungi have surfactants and different enzymes that basically reach out and grab the um the compounds and let them work so there's these different heterotrophic autotrophic bacterias some systems we'll talk about are hybrids they have a little bit of everything it really depends on what you're trying to treats and how much space you have and what your permit is and we'll again we'll talk about permits and and what we're trying to treat that's the that's the biology at the heart of this again it's bio microbiology it's really the bugs potatoes work here so let's talk at a high level for industrial applications what kind of systems are there what what are they what does the bio filter look like um Let me let me say this one caveat here before we get into this too far um there's a lot of sometimes it's semantics right A lot of people call one thing a biofilter and the thing a bio scrubber or they call it objects for things they might be meaning the same thing for this presentation um if you want to learn more that you may have great PDF about out there about biofiltration it talks a lot of this information some more details and points you in great ways to learn we use the naming convention they use there and this kind of goes from left to right in in age of development so I'm oldest to the most recent and in complexity um and so we start on the left a bio filter one of the earliest designs you know on the order of 100 years old kind of Technology we'll talk a little more details but it's the simplest one you basically take the air emission you use a blower to put it below the bed and it goes out through the bed and gets treated and you have biology in that bed it's not as much control we'll talk about pros and cons there in a second then we get a little more complexity talk about a biotrickling filter you can think of those using a wastewater treatment plants it's a lot like a trickling filter except for where there they have it in water here we have it in air similar concept A lot of carryover those of you that know about chemical pack bed scrubbers similar to that the third one on the right we're calling it a bio scrubber and that is a The Next Step Up in complexity and that is more about you have a scrubber and the goal is to get whatever you're trying to a mission you're trying to treat into the water and then once it gets into the water you put it into a large sump and that sump has different equipment to treat the emissions right so you do the the oxidation kind of away from the scrubber in this cell now the soap might be at the bottom of it or it might be off to the side and this is intentionally I showed a pretty complex flow path this comes from there's a German standard a vdi standard out there about bio scrubbers it's very interesting um it's got a lot of good details there but but you can see there's different levels of clarifiers and fixed beds and different ways aeration to treat it and that can that certainly has its place um and then we show the bottom right we're calling that a hybrid system this is from our perspective an interesting approach to things we see this in different spots this is basically saying let's look from these different Technologies and you know one might be good for a certain compound one might be good for another compound but what if you have both compounds right so how do you integrate these together and that's what a hybrid system is right you have um maybe chamber one that's high philic and chapter two does hydrophobic or you need extra retention time so you can size your changes appropriately gives you a little more control for combining Technologies and and basically the takeaway here is there's a couple different ways to to skin this and what you need to look at is you look at your admission type your permit requirements and operational considerations for example the top left one the bio filter you might be somewhere remote and you just don't have a maintenance crew there and it's it's the simplest to run you just kind of Let It Go and you don't have to worry about it too much but then you might be somewhere where you're more in a bigger city and you put footage is really a premium and you might want something like the bio scrubber and you already have a maintenance crew there so you got to look at all your considerations so let's dig a little bit deeper into the system types pros and cons so again biofilter here's a great picture on the left of one being installed you can see there's actually four different sections here um so they're cheap to install right you can see it's basically looks like a drainage system you're going to put some sort of um media on top a lot of times the media is organic so that media would look like things like mulch or compost or a different bark things of that nature as I mentioned earlier it's simple maintenance there's just a basically a blower not allowed to take care of the one caveat to that is medium media replacement it's an organic media we'll talk a little bit about channeling channeling in a second but that organic material can get used up it can clog um you know you can get too much biomass growth because you don't have a lot of control and so you have to replace it typically let's say two to five years is a range to be thinking about and it's not a simple change right you can see how large this is it takes a couple weeks to switch that out so it's good to um just to think about that in your and your planning um another Pro or another thing to consider it actually can do very well in Dre on certain types of things um not again you've got to know pros and cons of different things um you can get different types of bacteria and fungi growing in these environments and so you can do very well because they typically have high retention times and that's the next point right retention time so you'll hear the term ebrt empty bed resonance time it's basically how long is the air in the media right so um it's a biological process right it's more time just like a thermal oxidizer you need to have enough time for the oxidation to happen or thermal oxidizer might happen in a second or less here in this system you're looking 30 to 90 seconds so that they're big systems they're very large systems and that's something to think about um again when you're looking at different systems um some challenges that we see with biofilters so as I mentioned it these were the early designs 100 years old time frame you still see them get installed today they have their place but they do have challenges typically they're large Fields without a roof so it can be a little tricky to really know removal efficiencies you could obviously put a roof on it if you chose to that would kind of cut into your cost advantages but that's that's one of the challenges storage loading efficiency you typically don't have the ability to dump something into a sump you don't have ability to take any you grow the biology for what you've got coming and if that changes dramatically the system can have a trouble footprint again you can see here's another great picture it's huge they're really really large again that's practical in some places but not all places and then the one other thing that's really interesting is better compaction so we see this picture on the left um it's mulch right it's it's compost it's organic it's things are changing so the bed will settle over time you'll get channeling right we see channeling in other okay obviously the emissions are going to go out the channel and not through the bed and when they go through the channel you're going to have really low Dre performance there and so that really starts to impact and that's why the media replacement cycle two five years is something to be aware of so let's go to the next phase of the of the step in technology so bio trickling filters so we just talked about some challenges here and as folks were designing systems I looked at okay how do we solve these problems and what else is out there so as I mentioned wastewater treatment plants um they have trickling filters they are all about treating material that's in the water and pouring the water over media and letting biofilm grow in that media this is very similar concept except we gotta get the emission into the water as part of the process so how do we do that we basically take a chemical scrubber which is all about getting air air emissions into scrubbing water and then a trickling filter which is about treating water that has stuff in it right so it works together great um it has a narrative media inert media the top rights pictures of three types of media a good example we have fixed film on that left corrugated looking plastic that's very commonly used in the trickling filter space for the right of that we have like random Media or packing balls um very similar to chemical scrubbers you're looking for places for biology to attach you look at the drip point it's very similar concept of scrubbing and letting stuff build up on it and then the top it's a it's a puff a foam media and that is useful in places where maybe growth isn't as excessive it's not worried about plugging it but you need lots of surface area it depends on where you're going that's where you should work with with whoever's designing the equipment to understand the emission and the application to pick the right kind of media they have pros and cons the corrugated media has very low Delta P um it's very good for certain aspects but you're not going to get as much surface area or efficiency as the foam for example um so another thing that's really common or as part of the this biotrickling filter aspect is the continuous irrigation right so we're spraying water over the top of the media all the time and generally these are counter current um flow pass for those of you that aren't familiar with scrubbers that basically means the air is going up and the water is going down so the flowing counter occurring to each other um and what that means is with irrigation you get a couple things one scrub it that we talked about so that's about getting the emissions into the water um it's also about keeping the proper moisture in the system so biology just like your grass your yard right your plants it needs moisture you want to keep it in the right range nutrient supplementation so I didn't talk about too much on the biofilter side but that that organic material in the media that's a lot of the nutrients so it's very hard to add it once it's gone you really got to put New Media here here because the media is a nerd that's not giving you any nutrients but if you need to add nutrients you can basically just inject it with the irrigation water and then also biomass control is another thing that you can turn some knobs on Flow rates and irrigation rates and nutrients and other chemicals to control the biomass you want to have enough to treat everything but you don't have so much that it overgrows and you can't flow through it so this gives you one more knob and to control again biology is on the main media from ebrt that residence time we talked about earlier so remember the last one I said I think I said 30 to 90 seconds so it's it's much higher here we've seen as slow as two seconds two to 60 is kind of a common range so you can imagine um the cubic feet of media is is much lower on this kind of system so that's a nice Advantage there are no free lunches right so what does that mean increased operating costs and maintenance so we've got some more pumps to deal with um you might have to clean the media out it might not have to replace it but you might have to clean it out you probably have some sensors but I'll go a little more into the instrumentation but those sensors need calibration right they need maintenance and cleaning there does the pumps need a filter basket for example so there's just steps of Maintenance nothing crazy nothing that a plant um a facility that has a maintenance team can't do we regularly see these things lasting 15 years without really any major intervention and it's and the bio scrubber aspect or the scrubber part of it's really targeting water-soluble substances so let's talk about the Third Kind of subsets here bio scrubbers again that's kind of we're going down this journey of complexity or or development in the technology so bios covers is the next one um so basically you're adding a sump to a biotrickling filter to add more biological activity right so you're you don't add it in the media you add it in the sump and the sump can be a tank it can be other industrial Wastewater systems and it's all about treating it gives you more control more options change the temperature do different things add add chemicals refiners clarifiers things like that there's a lot of buttons here and so it's all about the sump right again it's water soluble compounds no substances it's got inert media you have all the same ability with continuous irrigation which is nutrient control scrubbing efficiency biomass control things like that again that no free lunch comment that compound flexity comes with performance but it also comes with cost and maintenance right so you've got more equipment to maintain um in general these are these are well vetted Technologies from the industrial Wastewater space so so it works well it's not it's not too hard to deal with but there is more to take care of so we're always advancing right the goal is to how do we do better and we're going to talk about the hybrid I mentioned the hybrid is kind of a fourth thing and what how did the hybrid come up right the hybrid approach or what we're going to talk about in a minute it's all about removal efficiency right so I talked about earlier different types of compounds how do we separate how we treat them right so we're talking about step one separation which is partitioning hydrophilic and hydrophobic compound treatment methods right so trait one then treat the other so the hydrophilic removals typically number one so you have something that's a scrubber or something similar or a bio trickling filter chamber and that gets the hydrophilic and then you have some emissions that are going to come out to the next phase and you want to put in something for hydrophobic and so that's the fungi and the other types of maybe longer retention time things like that so that would be the next chamber and then the the other takeaway from this is recirculation so we have different biology but we need nutrients everywhere and there's always value in kind of stirring the pot when it comes to biology you know we're trying to reinoculate often right because because microbes don't live forever right you're always trying to grow more so recirculation at the same water between the two gives you the ability to control what's growing or help growth in the multiple Chambers um this is I don't know how here's a poll question Mary I guess do I read this so I'll read it how's that whole question technology go ahead I can read I'm I'm good at reading I think so all right is your company looking at Greener Technologies or other carbon footprint reduction initiatives so this goes from yes we're doing them right now to yeah we know it's coming in in about a year it's a couple years off or or no it's not really on our radar so if I click to this and I'll let Mary you can go to the next slide when you think it's time okay we'll just see everybody two or two answer and just you know kind of curious on where everyone's at with some of their initiatives we'll give it a little bit more time since the last poll question seem to take a few seconds to catch up so all right Let's see what some of these answers are we've got a wide mix here I think you know some at this point don't have anything planned but you know definitely you know a decent amount that are already in the process of doing something quite a few about 10 there that you know are within the next year and then within the next couple years and that's definitely what we're seeing I think across the board with a lot of companies that you know there's definitely a move to you know looking for greener technologies and trying to figure out how to reduce their carbon footprint and you know timeline that that makes a whole lot of sense so thank you yeah that's great yeah this certainly aligns to it so a couple quick things we were talking about the hybrid here's an example of a hybrid system they're they exist in industrial space for a couple decades now they're they're a great technology this left one you can see one installed in the right graphic shows kind of the workflow of there's one chamber in the left and there's one chamber in the right and turn will go a little deeper on that again it's all about VOC getting more the vocs some sometimes you're gonna have hydrophilic and hydrophobic and so you need an approach that addresses both of them um I think we have another yeah so here's a little zoomed up picture of it so it doesn't have to look like only one format right so there's a horizontal one on the left which is greatest Focus um then you have a bigger unit maybe because it doesn't get you tall and then if you don't have as much space you can do it on the right which is you're stacking in the systems right so air is swelling from bottom to top and you can see if you squint that says bio trickling filter on the bottom and bio filter on the top right so that's the hydrophilic on the bottom and then you're going to get the hydrophobic on the top and more about yet but there's ways to get organic media in that biofilter to help growth of different types of biology and so a couple of points before I hand over to Vern to get more in the details um where would we see bio activation applications fitting in industrial applications so we we've seen them installed in the last again a couple decades in a large area of the industrial space engineering wood is is really honestly the biggest one very common there it's got a really good use case there but we see it a lot of places like paint Coatings and resin applications anything anything that's thinking about Narco or thermal oxidizer there's probably a good fit here or it's at least considering a good fit it's not there are definitely some nuances here that should be considered not all compounds are conducive to biology growth but but it's something to consider so here's a bunch of options um as you can see they're kind of a broad spectrum of the industrial space and then let's look at one couple more slides here about what what's in the industrial installation looks like so here's a paint manufacturer and they were trying to treat hydrocarbons from the mixing process and just to give you some scale this is a 20 000 CFM system It's a combination of a a bio trickling and then a biofilter stages and so it's it's frankly not the smallest thing ever right they're they're big but what was interesting here is this is a bio filter but it's modular right there was a conversation about the the paint process might be changing or the manufacturing process would be changing and they wanted to treat some some different compounds down the road and this the fact and that gives you flexibility it's a nice thing about being modular is you can you can add chunks um as needed if your process changes and again as I mentioned we're talking industrial today but just to give a little awareness of the municipal side I think people are probably somewhat common are aware of your headworks and pump station systems these are the typically smaller there's a lot of these out there they often are bio trickling filters and sometimes biofilters are typically a little simpler lower maintenance they do they do really well in that space and so with that I'm going to turn it over to Vern to really dig in a little bit about what makes a good bio filter and some of the engineering technical details to be considered for that so Vern if you want to take over very good thank you Thomas can you hear me hello yep okay very good so as far as what makes it a good application um you know we can look at both Municipal and and Industrial and as far as what we like to see because this is a living system that we're we're we're we're um using to to treat our contaminant we like to have then continuous operations so whatever the emission stream is that we're going to be treating it's best if it's continuous and that kind of gets away from them not having a feast and famine type scenario so because it is a living system we want to avoid where we're not going to have having food or the contaminants going to it and ideally as far as the amount of contaminants and the concentration the loading of these contaminants high to low we don't like it if it varies more than like a three to one ratio so ideally it's consistent and then we don't have high peaks in the in in the um contaminants that we're going to be bioxidizing the next is just because I'm going to say it's easier is if the the contaminants of concern are hydrophilic meaning you know more water soluble then that's going to be we know that's going to be easier for us to prefer the biology than to do their job and we'd be looking at the the biotrickling filter in that case the next is the Airstream the with the biology likes it when it's warm there's two two different ranges but there's a range of 80 degrees to about 115 where where the biology can live then there's a warmer range um 125 degrees to 150 and if we go above that range that you know that there's an issue and finally another thing that makes for an ideal application if there's no or very little particulates or solids and if there are particulates or solids then um you know that that has to be dealt with so if if we run into a situation where like for example if there's low temperature then we can still perhaps consider using a bio oxidation system but we're going to have to then take steps to to to um bring that um temperature up this is literally heating the Airstream or perhaps we can add temperature to the um sum and um if if it's too high the temperature is too hot if there's an emission streams that we want to consider biofiltration then we're going to have to perhaps use the loosen there I'm particulate if you have a stream that has too much particulates then you're going to have to remove that with um pre-treatment in front of your bio oxidation system such as a Venturi scrubber or perhaps a dust collector but just to get the particulates out so that we're not having an issue perhaps with the media and plugging the media with the extra extra solids and then finally not that you know as far as hydrophobic compounds those less water soluble those are not as easy but we we can still treat those and Thomas has already talked about that it's going to end up you know simply what we are going to look for is is more detention time and and quite often what we need to do and this is more for an industrial applications would be some piloting in order to really hone in on what kind of times do we need to to meet our objectives and what we've done a lot of talking on these hydrophilic and hydrophobic compounds and I like this slide this is representative of a um 15 second bio trickling filter and what we can see here is the hydrophilic compounds at the top of the table are just more readily dissolved in water and we achieve higher destruction during that that time period other less water-soluble compounds at the bottom of the table are are do not we don't do as well with those and and again that has to do with the fact that we're not able to get those hydrophobic compounds into the water as easily where then the biodegradation can take place and quite often if we start looking at at compounds that that we know are are less water soluble than we want to consider piloting and due to the fact that more likely than not it's going to be an industrial application because the municipal mission that we use for um biofiltration those are our the the the emissions are pretty standard regardless of of you know what wastewater treatment plant uniform wastewater treatment plant you're at but there is as far as Industrial then quite often we'll end up having a matrix a soup mix if you will of compounds that we need to consider and you're not sometimes you're not always going to be 100 sure of the effect on the biology until you do that piloting so that in addition to determining and trying to quantify then the um the detention time that you need and that ties in then with and you can see here when you pilot a an emissions training you're able to get some valuable information as far as what are the optimum parameters that I need you know what is that detention time and that we can use then in order to to meet our objectives as far as the data that we want to get with the pilot it's very going to be very important of course to Define your objectives and that's going to come into just knowing what do I need to meet you know with this biofiltration unit and once you have your objectives and goals defined then based on so some some of the information that you you know of the the emission stream you can then select the type of biofiltration unit that you want be it a or what a pilot does allow you to do is investigate um and Vary perhaps the detention times and to see what works in order to achieve those those removal efficiencies that you need to get and it's important then to just to collect the data just so that you can define success with what you've done and this I like this this photo basically shows then pilot scale pilots and the benefit of a pilot Scale Pilot is the fact that you are doing the pilot testing and the actual emissions to be treated and one can the alternative would be to do a bench Scale Pilot which literally can be on on a laptop bench but again pilot scale testing does give you the opportunity to um do real world emissions and and investigate then the the treatment scheme that you're looking at as far as design parameters but there's there's a range of parameters that one would initially consider and for a bio oxidation system generally you're not going to want the compound loading um or the range of compound loading is going to be 10 parts per million to about 500 parts per million and again this is a guideline um the next for biotrickling filters and bio scrubbers the detention time is perhaps 15 seconds or less for standard bio filters as Thomas is saying the ebrt could be 15 or to 60 seconds and then for some industrial applications that may be longer perhaps even over over a minute the gas velocity that you're that is readily used for these various bio oxidation systems is quite often 50 feet per minute or less another design parameter that we have to consider regardless of of the particular bio oxidation system is the irrigation rate and that's going to vary from 0.1 gallon per minute to 0.121 down per minute per foot squared and that foot squared is then the surface area of the media so and then in addition there's also pH that that we will that the pH is actually more of a process parameter in comparison to a design parameter and that the pH more results from the biology that you use and that's similar event to temperature you know we know perhaps that based on our emissions temperature the the design biology that we want to use but it is actually the biology itself that will say well this is the temperature that I'm going to be at and here we can talk as far as those temperatures there's two real classes of biology that that we all look at for these systems and one is the higher temperature range which is the thermophilic bacteria and those range require a temperature they thrive in an environment from 125 degrees to 155 degrees and then the other class of microorganisms that we will consider are the mesophilic organisms and those do well in in any temperatures between 60 degrees to 80 degrees as far as the parameters that are required in order to control the system what we're what we we look at then for a biofilter you can see that on the image on the left the biofilter really has only one rotating piece of equipment and that is the fan so and then the other thing that we'll get into a little bit more is a bio trickling filter so as far as the process parameters for the bio filter what = you know the the what we're going to be measuring and need to quantify with the bio with the bile filter is the gas emission flow rate and this year it's going to measure by using an inline velocity probe um and that would be then configured for your particular duct dimensions and there's also you can also use pressure as an indicator of your flow rate another process parameter for biofilters is the irrigation flow rate and that's going to be closer to the 0.1 gallons per minute per foot squared bio filters are going to require lower irrigation flow rates and the irrigation most likely it's going to be on for a set period of time followed by an off interval the objective for a bio filter for the water side is to keep the filter bed moist and optimize the performance of the fungi and bacteria so continuous irrigation of a biofilter may be detrimental if it flushes um the the fungus away and then as far as temperature temperature should be monitored it with your bio filter just to assure that the media buds remains in the temperature range selected either that mesophilic range 55 degrees to 115 or the um or the thermophilic range 125 degrees to 50. and now as far as a biotrickling filter this the process parameters that we're going to monitor um are these are the additional process parameters because all the process parameters of a bio filter the gas flow rate we would monitor that but now we're also going to be looking at the recirculation rate the recirculation rate is going to be closer to the one gallon per minute per foot squared for the bio trickling filter for a bio scrubber and the biotrickling filters are continuously irrigated and this goes back to that what we're relying on here is is that these compounds are going to be more easily water soluble Lowdown is also going to be monitored with the biotic filter and this is just to to assure ourselves that this system is going to remain healthy we need to make sure that the byproducts from the bio oxidation do not build to an inhibitory level or toxic level and and therefore we're going to drain part of the sump or some part of the sump to um to drain and add fresh water and pH in the conductivity are two parameters that are used to signal that a blow down should occur as far as pH is monitored just to make sure that that the environment stays where it needs to stay and generally speaking for most industrial applications it involves the mitigation of organic gluten and then these organic glutens will be treated with the heterotrophic bacteria that Thomas had talked about earlier and these bacteria operate in the six to eight pH Rings most Municipal applications on the other hand are treating non-organic compounds such as hydrogen sulfide or reduced organic sulfur compounds and these reduce offer compounds are biologically oxidized by the autotrophic bacteria and these autotrophs thrive in an acidic environment in the 1.5 to 2 range and then I think this is it's interesting to note that these autotrophs actually are generating sulfuric acid as they oxidize reduced software compounds and again then we use we blow down then just to make sure that they don't produce too much acid now and then conductivity like pH is can be used then to um signal that a blow down should occur and that's more for the industrial applications that we will use conductivity and then nutrients is is the final process parameter and and these are biological systems so we need to make sure that um the the two main nutrients that that we make that one everyone in this in the in the in the system are phosphorus and nitrogen and they are um you know required in order for for the biology to do what they need to do and normally once a week sampling is sufficient in order to um to take a grab sample from your sump or from the recirculation line and have that measured you can either use field test kit such as a hat kit to assure yourself that there are sufficient nitrogen and phosphorus in the system where you can have that those um samples analyzed at a lab and you can see that the little nutrient tank in the right that is actually done you know what provides our storage where then we meter in the nutrients into the system and it can either go into the recirculation line like it's shown here or sometimes they're added right into the stump and then the next as far as um this is talking about hybrid systems and some of them the the um equipment that that we end up monitoring and using what I whether it's a vertical system you can see and again I guess it's just squint and that that we do have the two rotating pieces of equipment are the um exhaust fan as well as the recirculation pump and that would be the same for for either one so and with the as far as a bio trickling filter system the fan and the pump are going to constitute the majority of the installed first Power this is this is where you're if you want to figure out your energy requirement it's going to be because of the fan and because of the recirculation pumps and that's what we're seeing here again the two main pieces of equipment for a biotrickling filter and a bio filter would just have the fan but here here's our hybrid system where the hybrid valve filter system we take advantage of the benefits of the biotrickling filter which is the first chamber and couple it with the with the bio filter which is the second chamber and then you can see the air travels in the counter current manner in the first chamber whereas the airflow was co-current in the irrigation spraying the second chamber and then the first chamber this is where the overwhelming majority of the water soluble compounds are oxidized the chamber is filled with a with fixed structured media for biosome attachment and the continuous spray from the thumb scrubs the organics into the water for treatment by the bacteria nutrients then are added to the sum and distributed then via the recirculation spray foreign in the first chamber is fixed media the vertical flow media has Superior bio solids flushing parameters and this media the media itself we're not of Australian the next slide it's located above the grading as shown in the photo on the right the media is supported off the floor of the biofilter to provide a plenum for air distribution picture on the left shows that the um the fixed media loaded in the first chamber bio trickling filter and the random packing media the White media and the second chamber which is then the bio filter the second chamber acts more like an enhanced file filter and is filled with random or dumped in packing some of the random packing is filled with compost this chamber is irrigated intermittently in order to optimize the formation of fungi that together with the bacteria removes the more recalcitrant and harder to degrade vocs and THC the intermittent irrigation is the source of nutrients for the for this biofilm as well these photos show the random packing that is in the second chamber bottle filter the structure of the packing helps to eliminate compaction and also the compost some of this media is filled with compost and that provides a good home if you will for an optimizes fungi formation one more quick poll question and we'll pass this back to Vern you might need to do some high level on the end of these sides we're down to about four minutes for the rest of the presentation so where can bio filtration systems be used effectively and I'll give you guys all a couple minutes here we've got the wood industry the paint industry food and beverage semiconductor and solar or all of the above and just let everyone do this real fast we'll take a look and see if you guys picked up on that from one of the earlier slides all right let's see good job everyone yeah it's all of the above really I mean there's a couple industries that certainly have seen in more than others you know as Thomas has said wood industry and paint industry but you really can use it in all of these it just really depends on the application and parameters that you have in terms of size and structure so good job and we're gonna give it to Vern here to take us to the end very good thank you and this um what we're showing here is this is the second chamber which would be the bio filter chamber empty and then we have another one where another photo here showing it filled this is we use mist eliminators between the two Chambers and this provides the opportunity or just prevent any over watering from that first chamber on biotrickling filter to to the bio filter so conventional equipment is used there this is just a simple Chevron blade style mist eliminator is used in between those two Chambers so that we don't have don't disturb then our biology in that second chamber aren't the process parameters that we've identified with our piloting and and then that that we want to control um pH conductivity temperature and quite often that's done with just a PLC you know an instrumentation that is used for biofilters Bio trickling filters it's standard instrumentation um temperature sensors pH transmitters the wild very standard what's nice about you know biofilters we talked about at Thomas I already mentioned it Green Technology there's no NAX um production there's a reduction in CO2 so that's that's very important to remember and and to consider a true Advantage truly a green technology that way and then looking at this slide then is a comparison of the various technologies and I just I've got a lot of information on here I'm just going to say that as far as I'm bio filters are going to be lower in energy compared to many of the other technologies especially and the fact that with the low energy let me show this slide here we we have this is a comparison of 165 000 ACF um emission stream and we looked at both you know bio filters biotrickling filter and a thermal oxidizer and it as far as the cost you can see that the cost of the energy for the thermal oxidizer outweighs than the two bio oxidation systems and the biotrickling filter which does have a excuse me the biofilter which has a longer detention time and we are able to get more of the vocs there is a little bit more energy required for for that reflected in that affects cost but you do get some additional boc degradation with that with that bio filter and the longer detention time the biotrickling filter much shorter detention time um so you're irrigating less and so you save some money the RTL though has great performance as far as boc and the hats which is the the what we have quantify is water-soluble and here's just a photo of a completed system now where the questions thank you Vern thank you Thomas this is great um and we actually are a little bit over so we're going to do a couple quick questions but just a reminder for the pdh if you are here for that you need to take that quiz and you must have you must pass it with eight out of 10 and be present for at least 50 minutes of the presentation you can always go back with the links that you have and re-watch it if you are missing some of the time we will stay live for another 30 minutes after we go quiet but you'll still be able to do things on the presentation just a reminder the two last widgets are the ones that you need to focus in on and once you have everything completed you will be able to print out your certificate and let me just hit a couple of questions here real quick just give me a second here to post them to the screen so first question normally does the blow down require further treatment you want to answer that I think probably speak to the best I'm sorry what was the question Mary normally does the blow down require further treatment yes I'm going to say normally we're going to have to look at that blow down either it's going to be sent to a potw publicly owned treatment works into a local wastewater treatment plant um or where it would be treated then later or you're going to have to have on-site wastewater treatment so yeah okay and let's just do one more and again if you asked a question we did not get to it we do reply to all of them so don't worry about it we will get to your question here after if we can't do it and we'll do one more here and then go quiet so and it's not pushing to the screen so give me just a second here okay so ebrt dependent on the most recalcitrant compound in the mix okay many acronyms for me can anyone here on the team help I I think we would answer that is yes right Tom it is it's dependent on the most recalcitary compounds yeah We would we would look at the admissions stream and design the the size for the most challenging compound your permit requires sometimes the permits don't always require getting everything and so there you might be able to to work with your your requirement to figure out what makes the most sense right but as Vern mentioned earlier that second chamber can be quite large if needed if you have to get everything or or most of everything Hey excellent well thank you everybody for attending we really appreciate it we do have several more even
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