Summary

Biological destruction of toluene vapor from air streams was studied in a laboratory scale biofilter. The packing material (peat) used in the reactor was immobilized with acclimatized bacterial suspension. The original microbial consortium was obtained as an activated sludge suspension from a local waste water treatment plant. The use of porous packing materials in biofilters may lead to considerable mixing of the gas phase. Since the performance of a reactor greatly depends on the mixing characteristics, a detailed analysis of the residence time distribution (RTD) was performed under abiotic conditions. The RTD results show that there is a significant amount of dispersion in the biofilter. An axial dispersion model has been developed and solved numerically using dispersion numbers obtained from RTD studies alon