Total Ammonia Nitrogen (TAN), which occurs due to various reasons especially
fish defecation and death, is crucial for life and bring about death of living creatures. Therefore, it is very important to reduce the amount of TAN in water and it is called as Nitrification process.
In order to carry out the nitrification process in the best way, the bacteria must be optimally provided in the environmental conditions of the habitat. The parameters that ensure these are: 1) biomedia surface, 2) pH of water in unit, 3) amount of oxygen in the air, and 4) optimum two-phase flow of water-air flow. There are two ways to remove TAN in fish farming and industrial aquariums. One of them is Trickle filter and the other is Moving Bed Biomedia Reactor (MBBR). It can be said for these two systems that provide advantages over each other, but to sum up; the MBBR is more user-friendly and more advantageous in that it provides higher removal rate of TAN in the same size. By giving the air taken from the blower into the water, a double phase flow will be provided inside the MBBR unit. Modeling this is important in terms of the accuracy of the intermediate and main parameters.
The aim of this study is to structure the project according to the parameters that need to be optimized above. The methods used consist of mathematical modeling according to the amount of TAN determined on a project basis, MBBR unit sizing, biomedia diversity and mixing ratio determination, and finite element analysis with ANSYS CFX® to model two-phase flow.
Keywords: Nitrification, nitrification process, moving bed biomedia reactor (MBBR), industrial aquarium, aquaculture.