ABSTRACT
Attached growth processes have been used for the aerobic treatment of wastewaters for over a century, primarily in the form of trickling filters and rotating biological contactors. Nevertheless, during the past two decades much has been learned about the mechanisms by which such processes operate, leading to the development of new bioreactor configurations, such as the fluidized bed biological reactor (FBBR) discussed in Chapter 18. Like the FBBR, this new generation of attached growth bioreactors tends to have media that is submerged in the process flow, hence the name submerged attached growth bioreactor (SAGB). This chapter introduces some of the more promising SAGBs. It is not meant to be an extensive review of all that have been proposed, but rather is intended to familiarize the reader with some of them.
