Anatomy of the organic carbon in an industrial wastewater: Implications of particle size distribution, respirometry and process modelling

Abstract This study evaluated the fate of chemical oxygen demand (COD) fractions of an organized industrial district effluent treated with pilot membrane bioreactor (MBR) system. A series of respirometric analyses were performed on raw wastewater together with 450 nm, 100 kDa and 1 kDa filtered samples obtained from particle size distribution (PSD) experiments. The PSD analysis revealed that more than 300 mg/L of the influent COD accumulated in the lowest size range (