From the most recient Advanced Aquarist comes a great study by Rob Toonen AKA Biogeek, formerly of Edmonton Alberta now on an island
Feature Article: An Experimental Comparison of Sandbed and Plenum-Based Systems. Part 1: Controlled lab dosing experiments
Quote:
Background and Introduction:
Plenum-based systems gained widespread acceptance after Dr. Jean Jaubert worked with the Monaco Aquarium in transporting a complete live portion of a coral reef from the Red Sea for display at the Aquarium. Dr. Jaubert worked extensively with naturally-collected coral substrates to enhance captive biological filtration in captive aquaria, and was granted a French patent for the plenum design in the late 1980s followed by a US patent the early 1990s. Based largely on the success of the Monaco Aquarium's "Microcean" display, this plenum-based aquarium design has become one of the primary design methods used by public aquaria around the world, and for nearly a decade was almost equally popular among hobbyists maintaining home aquaria.
However, in the past several years, the "deep sandbed" design has largely supplanted plenum-based systems among US hobbyists. The reliance on a thick bed of carbonate sediments is essentially the same as that of plenum-based system, but the utility of the void space beneath those sediments has been vigorously questioned. Advocates of deep sandbeds argue that it is the sediment itself and not to presence of a void space beneath those sediments that perform the nutrient processing capacity (e.g., Toonen 2000a, 2000b). There have been numerous articles and books written in the aquarium hobby about the advantages and disadvantages of designs for each of these two recirculating systems (e.g., Adey & Loveland 1991, Tullock 1997, Auger 1999, Goemans 1999, Shimek 2001, Hovanec 2003, Delbeek & Sprung In press). There remains considerable debate about the most efficient design of a sediment bed for processing nutrients in a recirculating system, but to date these arguments have been based almost entirely on personal opinion and anecdotal evidence.
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For the ballance of the article
http://www.advancedaquarist.com/2005/6/aafeature
Part one of two
If you cant wait, and I couldn't the original study was published in Aquaculture
Cheers
MitchMc