One of the most notable developments in anaerobic treatment process technology is the upflow anaerobic sludge blanket (UASB) reactor invented by Lettinga and coworkers (Lettinga et al., 1980) with its wide applications in relatively dilute municipal wastewater treatment and over 500 installations in a wide range of industrial wastewater treatment including food-processing, paper and agro-industrial process (Tchobanoglous et al., 2003).

Influent flow distributed at the bottom of the UASB reactor travels in an upflow mode through the sludge blanket and passes out around the edges of a funnel which provides a greater area for the effluent with the reduction in the upflow velocity, enhancement in the solids retention in the reactor and efficiency in the solids separation from the outward flowing wastewater. Granules which naturally form after several weeks of the reactor operation consist primarily of a dense mixed population of bacteria that is responsible for the overall methane fermentation of substrates (Rittmann and McCarty, 2001). Good settleability, low retention times, elimination of the packing material cost, high biomass concentrations (30,000-80,000 mg/L), excellent solids/liquid separation and operation at very high loading rates can be achieved by UASB systems (Speece, 1996). The only limitation of this process is related to the wastewaters having high solid content which prevents the dense granular sludge development (Tchobanoglous et al., 2003). Designed for OLR is typically in the range of 4 to 15 kg COD/m3-d (Rittmann and McCarty, 2001).