Living Machine System Process
- “Fixed film ecology” has superseded systems based on hydroponics or a fluid medium. In fixed film systems the wetland cells are filled with a solid aggregate medium providing extensive surface area for beneficial biofilm (treatment bacteria) growth. Fixed film ecology allows for denser and more diverse micro-ecosystems to form than does a liquid medium. These ecosystems go well beyond bacteria to include a variety of organisms up to and including macro-vegetation.
- Tidal cycles (filling and draining the wetland in accelerated tidal action—12 or more cycles per day) are used to passively bring oxygen into the wetland cells. This action mimics the same type of biological action of natural tidal estuaries. Tidal Flow Wetlands replace the need to blow air into a liquid medium and use gravity to bring atmospheric oxygen into the cell when it is drained.
Read more about this topic: Living Machines
Famous quotes containing the words living, machine, system and/or process:
“You are done for—a living dead man—not when you stop loving but stop hating. Hatred preserves: in it, in its chemistry, resides the “mystery” of life. Not for nothing is hatred still the best tonic ever discovered, for which any organism, however feeble, has a tolerance.”
—E.M. Cioran (b. 1911)
“The machine invades me all day.”
—Sharon Atkins, U.S. receptionist. As quoted in Working, book 2, by Studs Terkel (1973)
“The golden mean in ethics, as in physics, is the centre of the system and that about which all revolve, and though to a distant and plodding planet it be an uttermost extreme, yet one day, when that planet’s year is completed, it will be found to be central.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)
“A process of genocide is being carried out before the eyes of the world.”
—Pope John Paul II (b. 1920)