Aerobic biological treatment of wine effluent in series basins

Abstract

The recent evolution in environmental legislation for industrial facilities leads wineries to treat their effluents. A range of methods can acheive effluent treatment and some of them will be assessed as the cascade aerated tanks process. The assessment of the this process was aimed at providing a number of answers on the relevance of this configuration, on the design guidelines (in particular the number of tanks, their treatment and aeration capacity), on the expected efficiency. A monitoring period through different measurements allow to obtain knowledge of the hydraulic and organic loads to be treated. A detailed analysis of the biological system permitted to select the pertinent design parameters. For this kind of configuration, a total organic loading on the whole set of tanks of 0,12 kg BOD5 per kg VSS per day is satisfactory.The « cascade aerated tanks » process is found to be a convenient technique, since it showed appropriate treatment efficiency, it has low constraints upon operating, and produces a small amount of sludge. The obtained data will be of interest for the decision-makers, and will help to select the treatment process, evaluate the financial implications and assess the other features.