Investigating Settleability Properties of Different Sludges to Enhance Optimum Performance of an Upflow Anaerobic Sludge Bed Reactor

The performance of the upflow anaerobic sludge blanket (UASB) reactor depends largely on the settling properties and stability of the sludge bed. The investigation of the settling characteristics of three sludge samples collected from the municipal plant were tested. In this work, the temperature, pH, total dissolved solids and electrical conductivity were not controlled. These properties are known to influence the settleability of sludge and in this case, they were not taken into consideration. The settling of the various solid fractions in the sludge were measured in a 1 litre granulated flask to determine settleability properties. The 30 minutes sludge bed volume SV₃₀ and 30 minutes sludge volume index (SVI₃₀) were employed as measures of performance. The secondary sludge indicated better settling characteristics compared to the other two primary samples based on SV₃₀ (280 mL) and SVI (47.27 mL/g), The other two primary sludge samples had SV_30s and SVIs of 369, 880 mL/L and 22.43,37.22 mL/g, respectively. The secondary sludge has shown to be most suitable for the optimization of the UASB reactor system.