116 (Chapter 3 AEROBIC BIOLOGICAL PURIFICATION AND TERTIARY TREATMENTS The doses of powdered product are 2 to 4 mg-I"! As a result, the floc chickens and this brings about a clear-cut improvement in its settleability. Some 30 to 40% of the SS which previously escaped secondary clarification can be retained. Accordingly, a SS content in settled water of 80 to 90 mg-I is cut down to 35 ro 50 mg-I" in gasification or petrochemical facilities. Only joint use of an inorganic coagulant, Al or Fe, would make it possible to reach the threshold of 30, but the doses are high and it is not always advisable to enrich sludge in hydroxides when it is recycled to aeration. Recycling a cationic flocculant or its maniomer is also somerimes a subject of misgivings because the O; transfer might deteriorate. This does not seem likely with the doses used and when considerable excess sludge is produced. Industrial testing over a time frame corresponding to the age of biological sludge is in any case easy to implement. A second process is direct filtration of water after the secondary settler with some possible help provided by an organic coagulant (1 to 2.5 mg: of active matter). When water containing 60 to 70 mg-I"! of SS is to be treated, a filtrate with 30 mg-I"! of SS (efficiency - 50%) can be anticipated without coagulant or 20 with a coagulant. If water contains more than 80 to 100 ppm SS, a complete tertiary clarification with a DAF unit is advisable. 3.3.2 Eliminating the COD or TOC In petrochemical plant effluents, a fairly substantial fraction of the residual COD is in colloidal form or in the form of organic macromolecules which are hard to biodegrade. In the first instance, it is necessary to resort to large doses of inarganic coagulant to destabilize the dispersion (50 to 300 mg:I"! of 50% FeCls!). The sludge generated must be separated in a settler or in a DAF unit. The DAF gives better thickening of che extracted sludge and is therefore preferred. In the second instance, according co some practice in che U.S. petrochemical industry, powdered activated carbon (PAC) is added directly into the aeration tank in amounts that may vary from 10 to 50 mg-I"!. At che same time, however, advanced activared sludge age (40 to 45 days) is maintained and considerable reductions (from 10 to 20%) in TOC have been achieved. Filtration on granular activated carbon (GAC) is also practiced in North America, but development comes up against the cost of regenerating the activated carbon. The GAC may fix only 90 to 250 kg of COD per cubic meter and so its turnover time is short. When no (thermal) regeneration is done, the filters ensure only physical purification of the SS or even a biological purification of the soluble BOD. 3 4 Recycling A chronic shortage of available fresh water has prompted studies on reusing treated MW/W or refinery WW, especially in the U.S. The situation has recently worsened with the drought and so reuse now needs to be reconsidered more in-depth. In fact, reuse requires a certain escalation in equipment of increasingly complex design and operation, which can be chosen since needs are more sophisticated (boilers, for example). In contrast, when seawater is conveniently available it can be used to cool heat exchangers if they have been specially designed.