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8450042 
Meetings & Symposia 
A comparative study for destruction of hydrophobic VOCs in trickle bed air biofilters 
Hassan, AA; Sorial, GA 
2008 
Proceedings - Air & Waste Management Association. Meeting
ISSN: 1052-6102 
Portland, OR 
101st Air and Waste Management Association Annual Conference and Exhibition 2008 
1 
310-320 
English 
Biofiltration systems have emerged recently as an attractive option for controlling VOC emissions from industrial processes due its cost effectiveness. Three parallel Trickle Bed Air Biofilter (TBAB) were run continuously for a period of almost 1 yr to degrade n-hexane. Using Tomadol® successfully enhanced the biodegradation process of n-hexane in the TBAB and provided more stable performance. The fungi TBAB showed further performance enhancement. Flow switching with starvation in the TBAB is a good tool to enhance the performance. This strategy could replace backwashing for low yield micro organisms as in the case of n-hexane. Operation at acidic pH enhanced greatly the performance with removal efficiency around the 90% level. Using fungi culture would lead to higher loading rates that could not be achieved by microbial culture operated at neutral pH. This is an abstract of a paper presented at the 101st AWMA Annual Conference and Exhibition (Portland, OR 6/24-27/2008). 
Bacteria; Fungi; Hydrophobic Compound; n-Hexane; Trickle Bed Air Biofilter; Volatile Organic Compound