Development of a novel fungal fluidized bed reactor for gaseous ethanol removal

Abstract Fluidized bed bioreactors can overcome the limitations of packed bed air biological treatment such as clogging which has been observed in its industrial application for decades. Fluidized bed bioreactors’ treatment of volatile organic compounds in polluted waste air is limited by microbial growth. Two fungal species and two bacterial species were isolated to build a fungal-fluidized bed reactor (FFBR). The microorganisms had good hypha growth on the surface of wheat bran and coated any expended polystyrene. The system obtained an elimination capacity of 500–1800 g m−3∙h−1 with removal efficiencies ranging from 20% to 50% during the 65-days of operation. The pressure drops decreased to 4.27 Pa m−3∙d−1 when the air flow rate of the fluidized bed was 0.4 m s−1, which was used to increase the pressure by 4.94 Pa m−3∙d−1 as a packed bed. Meyerozyma, whose species were present in an initial inoculated isolate, was detected among the dominant species with 28.70% relative abundance; they were reported to degrade complicated compounds under similarly stressful environments.