Microscopy and Molecular Methods to Advance Performance and Design of Hybrid Biofilm Technology

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The need to develop new technologies that meet the wastewater treatment challenges of today has led to the design of innovative hybrid wastewater treatment technologies. The hybrid moving bed biofilm reactor (MBBR) and biological aerated filter (BAF) technology has been conceived to combine the advantages of the MBBR with an upflow BAF technology into a single hybrid system. In particular, the hybrid MBBR-BAF has been conceived to separate the heterotrophic population that consumes the readily degradable influent carbon from the autotrophic, ammonia removal population. Further, the hybrid system has also been conceived to mitigate the adverse effects of excessive heterotrophic growth on BAF media. The scientific approach of this research program is to isolate the impact of critical operational and design parameters on not only the performance of the system but also on the characteristics of the biofilm and the microbial communities on the dual media of the MBBR-BAF hybrid technology.