31-01-2009, 12:19 AM
The chemical process industries are facing increased regulation of hazardous air pollution. Air pollution control has emerged over the past 40 years as a significant industrial sector. Outgas emission control has become an overall pervasive technological problem, that is further complicated with legislative imperatives and demands of the market place. It is already clear that the industry requires efficient, affordable solutions that are also technology and configuration specific. Bio treatment of contaminants in air streams offers an inexpensive alternative to conventional technologies such as catalytic and thermal oxidations, wet scrubbing, ozonation and activated carbon adsorption. Our environment has the remarkable ability to keep itself in constant balance. One organism?s poison is another organism?s meal. Mother Nature is incredibly willing to accommodate the waste produced by human kind whether it is exhaled carbon dioxide, discarded banana peels, or industrially generated cyclic aromatic compounds. That?s the premise behind bio oxidation or biofiltration, a technology that uses naturally occurring microbial communities to degrade the industrial emissions. This review elucidates that bio-oxidation is a most promising technique for removing volatile organic compounds (VOCs) from contaminated air which uses active microbial population embedded in a solid media to degrade gas phase chemicals. It has received increasing attention in recent years as a viable and potentially cost efficient alternative method for VOC and odor treatments. That is, it is a disruptive technology with a bright future.
