Anaerobic Treatability Studies of Metal Industry Wastewater in Batch Reactor

With the rapid growth of the world population and the acceleration of urbanization and industrialization, the metal industry and the production of metal structures and building parts started to grow and develop rapidly. With these developments, the effects of the production of metal structures and components on the environment have increased. If the wastewater originating from the metal industry is discharged into water environments without proper treatment, it causes the accumulation feature in the environment and living creatures due to their toxic properties and various health problems, resulting in the death of aquatic organisms, their water quality being reduced and being unusable as drinking, using and irrigation water. It is known that organic matter and heavy metal concentrations in metal industry wastewater are high. Therefore, wastewater from the metal industry needs to undergo a suitable and adequate treatment. In this study, optimization of anaerobic treatment of metal industry wastewater was investigated by applying statistical based experimental design in different conditions. In full factorial experiments (i) 9 different experiments based on different initial wastewater concentrations (0.5%, 1%, 2%), (ii) cosubstrate type (glucose, propionic acid, acetic acid-butyric acid-propionic acid-ABP) variables mechanism has been established. The experiments were carried out in Oxitop C bottles in a 200 ml working volume with mixing. The necessary basal medium was added for the development of anaerobic microorganisms and the pH was adjusted to 7 ± 0.2. Trials were carried out at 35oC for 30 days. At the end of the process, COD removals were determined according to the input and output COD (chemical oxygen demand) values of the trials. As a result, the highest COD removal was found to be 97% in the diluted wastewater concentration of 0.5%, when glucose is used as a cosubstrate.