Abstract
Treatability tests were conducted using EMC process to study the feasibility of applying this process as recycling-water treatment system in high density seawater aquaculture farm. To study the effect of organic and ammonia nitrogen loading on system performance, hydraulic retention time of reactor was reduced gradually from 12hr to 10min. The conclusions are can be summarized as follows. When the system HRT was reduced from 12hr to 10 min gradually, there was little noticeable change(reduction) in ammonia nitrogen removal efficiencies until 2hr of HRT, however, removal efficiencies were decreased dramatically when the system was operated under the HRT of less than 2hr. In case of organics(COD), there was no dramatic deterioration in removal efficiencies depending on HRT reduction. More than 90% of removal efficiencies were maintained successfully when the system was operated at the HRT of 10 min. In case of system performance depending on media packing ratio in reactor, there was little difference in each reactor performance depending on media packing ratio in reactor when the reactors were operated under the HRT of longer than 1hr, however, differences in reactor performances were considerably evident when the reactors were operated under the HRT of shorter than 1hr. That is, the more reactor was packed, the better reactor performed. When comparing reactor performance among 25%, 50%, 75% packed reactor, it can be judged that media packing ratio more than 50% plays no significant role in increasing reactor performance. For this reason, packing the media less than 50% is more reasonable way in view of economic. Such a tendency well agreed with the variation of ammonia-nitrogen removal efficiencies according to the media packing ratio in reactors at each HRT. Difference in effluent ammonia-nitrogen concentration between 50% media packing reactor and 75% media packing reactor was negligible. When comparing with the results of 25% packing reactor, difference was not so great.