Paper Title
Biodegradation of TMAH (Tetramethyl Ammonium Hydroxide) in Semiconductor Industries (Life Bitmaps Project): Pilot Plant Design, Preliminary Tests and Process Analysis

Abstract
The main objective of this work is the description of experimental activities and a pilot plant designed and built for the treatment of three types of residual solutions coming from a multinational company of semiconductor production.The plant was designed within a LIFE project (N. LIFE 15 ENV/IT 000332) (http://www.lifebitmaps.eu/) and can offer an effective proposal to addressing the problem of the effluents produced by micro-electronic industries. Microelectronic industry produces significant amounts of wastewaters containing inorganic substances such as fluorides, phosphates, and organic pollutants such as acetic acid (CH3COOH), and tetramethylammonium hydroxide (C4H13NO, TMAH). These solutions shall be treated in order to reduce the pollutant concentrations, after that can be properly disposed or recycled into the plant for several uses. In this work an integrated chemical and biological process is proposed. TMAH is degraded by bacteria in an aerobic treatment, instead the concentrations of the inorganic compounds are reduced by lime precipitation. The processes have been developed into laboratory scale and currently are in progress the experiments into pilot scale in order to show the technical feasibility of the integrated process and define the optimal conditions to develop the process into an industrial scale. Index terms - Electronic Industry; Industrial Wastewaters; tetramethyl Ammonium Hydroxide; Removal Pollutants; Laboratory and Pilot Scale Tests; Saving Industrial Water consumption