Coupling Biofiltration and Adsorption to Treat Indoor VOCS
Abstract
This work is a preliminary study for the assessment of the feasibility of a system coupling biofiltration and adsorption to treat chemical pollution in indoor environments. Three studies have been carried out for that purpose. Firstly, an artificially contaminated air flow containing seven representative indoor volatile organic compounds (VOCs) was only treated by biofiltration using an organic material (compost) as a filter media. Then, toluene was selected as target pollutant for assessing the capability of the combination of biofiltration and adsorption to response to changes in inlet concentrations. Once the toluene containing air stream passed through the biofilter bed, the outlet gas stream was then fed into an adsorption system for complete contaminant removal. Finally, a biofiltration-adsorption system was designed taking into account the removal efficiencies of representative pollutants found at laboratory scale. The optimization of the EBRT to limit the volume of the biofilter for its application in indoors was experimentally evaluated.