In this study, change in water-dissolved oxygen (DO) was analyzed under various synthetic water qualities and nanobubbles (NBs) application conditions, such as gas type, initial DO as well as water dissolved, suspended and organic matters contents. When oxygen, rather than air, was introduced into nitrogen-desorbed ultra-pure water, the stagnation time was significantly increased. It took ten days for DO concentration to drop back to saturation. The higher the initial DO concentration, the longer particles were observed above saturation due to particle stability improvement. The oxygen mass transfer rate of 0.0482 mg/L/min was found to reach a maximum at an electrolytic concentration of 0.75 g/L, beyond which the transfer rate decreased due to adsorption of negative ions of the electrolyte at the interface. High levels of turbidity caused by suspended solids have become a barrier to dissolution of NBs oxygen into the water solution, and thus affected the transfer performance. On the other hand, by applying NBs for just an hour, up to 7.2% degradation of glucose as representative organic matter was achieved. Thus, NBs technology would maintain a high DO extent for an extended duration, and thus can improve water quality provided that water chemistry is closely monitored during its application.

No abstract

For effective ultrasonic algae removal, several studies have considered the ultrasound equipment linked factors, such as power and frequency. However, studies on the response of mixed algal cultures and associated water quality parameters to ultrasound are limited. In this lab-scale sonication, the removal of cyanobacteria at a pre-set frequency of 200 kHz on mixed algae suspensions collected from a eutrophic lake was investigated. The caution (17.5 µg/L) and outbreak (1450 µg/L) alert levels in terms of chlorophyll-a (Chl-a) concentrations of the initial samples were each sonicated for 10, 15, and 20 min, and then kept in an incubator. Fifteen minutes of sonication resulted in best removal efficiency of 0.94 and 0.77, at an ultrasonic dose of 30 kWh/m 3 at the outbreak and caution level concentrations, respectively. Immediately after 15 min sonication, and after standing in the incubator for a day, chlorophyll-a removal efficiencies of 0.28 and 0.90 were achieved in the outbreak level, respectively, and the matching removal efficiencies for the caution level were 0.23 and 0.64. Even though the removal was substantial in both cases, the final 147 µg/L chlorophyll-a concentration of the outbreak, which is itself still in the outbreak level range, shows that ultrasonication is not effective to satisfactorily remove algae from a concentrated suspension. Total dissolved nitrogen and chemical oxygen demand were reduced, overall, due to sonication. However, total dissolved phosphorus of the concentrated level was increased during the treatment. Although sonication needs further replicated experimental testing in whole-lake systems, our results show that 200 kHz sonication was able to reduce chlorophyll-a concentrations in small-scale laboratory tests.