Standards Development

Scope

This document describes biological air treatment techniques for biologic treatment of gaseous emissions various sources. It covers the basic principles and the basic design of this cleaning method and puts forward general technical requirements.

Purpose

The purification of polluted air is one of the most urgent environmental tasks. Many organic and inorganic compounds are very harmful to health, to the environment and often have negative influence to the atmosphere. The emission of polluted air from many different sources is increasing worldwide therefore the demand for environmentally friendly and economically acceptable cleaning techniques has grown significantly.

In the past frequently used methods as physical and thermal air cleaning techniques have the disadvantage, that they often provide further disposal and greenhouse gases and that they need surplus energy for operation. This makes them more expensive and less environmentaly friendly than biological air treatment techniques.

Among different air purification techniques, biological air treating equipment has been used more and more frequently in the last years. It could be shown that this method effectively treats emissions different sources and thereby prevent transmission of a variety of airborne pollutions. Biological equipment purifies waste air through microbial metabolism. The biochemical principle is comparable with the principle of the biological waste water treatment technology. The technique is divided into different process variants.

The advantage of this technique is the fact that is working on a natural basis at ambient temperature and ambient pressure and it does not need any additional energy (e.g. natural gas). That is why it has low operating costs and it is very eco-friendly. This makes it very interesting not only for industrial countries. Therefore, it has become more and more an important alternative air treatment technique in several applications.

Biological treatment, as a more and more upcoming technology still needs an available evaluation method first of all as tool to test the applicability of the technique. Common requirements need to be put forward for standardizing biological treatments in industrial plants, wastewater and waste treating plants and other applications to enable the selection, layout, planning and installation of this technology.

Meanwhile, it can also help manufacturers and suppliers to develop and optimize the devices. Therefore, the development of a standard method to evaluate and to design biological air treatment equipment is useful and necessary.