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- “Fixed film ecology” has superseded systems based on hydroponics or a fluid medium.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:
“The cart before the horse is neither beautiful nor useful. Before we can adorn our houses with beautiful objects the walls must be stripped, and our lives must be stripped, and beautiful housekeeping and beautiful living laid for a foundation.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)
“Man is a shrewd inventor, and is ever taking the hint of a new machine from his own structure, adapting some secret of his own anatomy in iron, wood, and leather, to some required function in the work of the world.”
—Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)
“He could jazz up the map-reading class by having a full-size color photograph of Betty Grable in a bathing suit, with a co- ordinate grid system laid over it. The instructor could point to different parts of her and say, “Give me the co-ordinates.”... The Major could see every unit in the Army using his idea.... Hot dog!”
—Norman Mailer (b. 1923)
“Consumer wants can have bizarre, frivolous, or even immoral origins, and an admirable case can still be made for a society that seeks to satisfy them. But the case cannot stand if it is the process of satisfying wants that creates the wants.”
—John Kenneth Galbraith (b. 1908)