A two-stage anaerobic system for biodegrading wastewater containing terephthalic acid and high strength easily degradable pollutants

The high strength easily biodegradable pollutants (represented by COD E) are strong inhibitors of terephthalic acid (TA) anaerobic biodegradation. At the same time, TA can inhibit easily biodegradable pollutants removal under anaerobic conditions to a limited extent. This mutual inhibition could happen and cause a low removal efficiency of both TA and COD E, when the effluent from TA workshops containing TA and easily biodegradable pollutants are treated by a single anaerobic reactor system. Based upon the treatment kinetics analysis of both TA degradation and COD E removal, a two stage up flow anaerobic sludge blanket and up flow fixed film reactor(UASB UAFF) system for dealing with this kind of wastewater was developed and run successfully at laboratory scale. An UASB reactor with the methanogenic consortium as the first stage removes the easily biodegradable pollutants(COD E). An UAFF reactor as the second stage is mainly in charge of TA degradation. At a COD E loading of 15.3 g/(L5d) and a TA loading of 1.4 g/(L5d), HRT 18.5h, the COD E and TA removal rate of the system reached 89.2% and 71.6%, respectively.