A REVIEW OF DIFFERENT CASE STUDIES ON BREWERY WASTE WATER (EFFLUENT) TREATMENT

Abstract

The main objective of this study is to find out the available treatment processes for brewery wastewater and to indicate the most common and effective treatment process. The quality and the quantity of a brewery effluent fluctuate significantly depending on various different processes that take place within the brewery. Biological process is the mostly used treatment process for breweries. Physical and chemical treatment processes can apply as pre-treatment before biological process. Most common biological treatment processes are: Aerobic Sequencing Batch Reactor; Up-flow Anaerobic Sludge Blanket Reactors (UASBR) & Membrane Bio-Reactor (MBR).Aerobic granular sludge technology is applied in waste water treatment for most importantly to remove nutrients (COD, P and N).Anaerobic process is less efficient in removing P and N, but it has good COD removal capability.COD removal efficiency is about 80% by using anaerobic process.MBRprocess is reliable and simple in operation. It requires low operation cost, high degree of automation but shows stable effluent quality. A combined treatment of UASB and MBR was done by Dong et al., (2010) and it is found thatthe average removal rate of COD is up to 96.05%.Nitrogen removal efficiency is up to 91.97%.Butit indicated that sludge concentration was higher; sludge settling was not well, and also the floc size was very small, so it accelerated membrane fouling; increased membrane filtration pressure and flux reduce as well cost. So anaerobic treatment is preferable in terms of cost, but it needs a following aerobic treatment process to meet the effluent quality.