Team:NTHU Taiwan/Design

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Design

In current wastewater treatment process, there’s no PFOA treatment; thus, PFOA leaks out to the environment easily. The best way to stop PFOA pollution caused by industrial wastewater is to remove PFOA in the wastewater before it is released into the environment.

For the purpose of preventing PFOA from leaking to the enironment, we developed a bioreactor system.

Working environment

We designed a bioreactor and named it “ PFOA bioremediation basin.” Following is a sketch of our reactor.

To develop a more complete bioreactor system, we plan to integrate our own device, PFOA bioremediation basin, into the current industrial wastewater treatment process in the factory producing PFOA wastewater.

First, wastewater passes through RO membrane, so that PFOA in the wastewater becomes more concentrated. Once the concentration of PFOA gets higher, the efficiency of our system can be lifted.

Next, after some adjustments, such as PH value and temperature, to make the wastewater a proper environment for bacteria to grow, wastewater enters our device, PFOA bioremediation basin.

After being processed in PFOA bioremediation basin, wastewater is added with calcium chloride solution of high concentration, so that fluoride, which is the predicted byproduct of PFOA degradation, can be precipitated. Meanwhile, escaping engineered bacteria will be killed for biosafety.

Device structure

As for PFOA bioremediation basin, we referred to the structure of current secondary treatment basin and set up a prototyping model. The structure of PFOA bioremediation basin is designed to mix wastewater with engineered E.coli in our basin perfectly and optimize the growth of bacteria.

Engineered E.coli will be cultured in the high concentration PFOA wastewater and these engineered bacteria will express Fac-dex to break C-F bonds in PFOA. In addition, wastewater is set to stay in the basin for a period of time to undergo PFOA degradation performed by engineered bacteria.


Simulation

We apply computational fluid dynamics (CFD) simulation to predict real situation of our project. CFD is a tool using algorithms and numerical analysis to solve problems of fluid mechanics.

We utilize CAD (Computer Aided Design), a software used to create precision drawings or technical illustrations, to establish the geometric model of our device and import this model to Ansys fluent, a software for CFD.

After setting the boundary condition and solution method, we can calculate the result and we can evaluate the efficiency of our project by the simulation.


Example:

Simplified model

Beginning of water pumped into our device( Velocity:m/s)

Steady state( Velocity:m/s)