Atividade

Characteristics of a Good Carrier Media

Tom owns a production factory. Every day, the factory produces 10 kg of a certain product. Based on his experience, Tom knows that, on average, one trained worker with correct tools could manage to pack and ship out 1 kg of the product daily. Being a predictive man, Tom considers the probability that one worker might get sick. To be on the safe side, he has 11trained workers instead of 10. This helps him prevent an overcapacity situation in the warehouse in the event that one of them is sick or the factory has to increase its production capacity. With his 11 trained workers and correct tools, Tom’s factory operates smoothly every day without trouble.

Now, let’s compare this with the biological wastewater treatment process. The product is the organic load to be removed by means of wastewater treatment; the trained workers and tools are equivalent to the carrier media and biomass in the wastewater treatment process, respectively. Similar to the workers who cannot pack and ship out the products without tools, the carrier MBBR media cannot remove the organic load from the wastewater without biomass.