Effect of organic matter on nitrogen removal through the anammox process

Abstract

In the anaerobic ammonium oxidation (anammox) process, the anammox bacterial activity is inhibited by high chemical oxygen demand (COD) contents. In this study, the effect of the COD/total nitrogen (TN) ratio and hydraulic retention time (HRT) on the efficiency of the anammox process in a fixed-bed reactor was assessed via experiments with increasing COD/TN ratios from 0 to 7.0 and different HRTs of 6, 9, and 12 hr. Felibendy cubes were used as the biomass carrier. The presence of organic compounds affects the performance of the treatment process, and the level of influence increases with the increase in influent COD. With COD greater than 300 mg/L, the anammox process was inhibited, TN efficiency was the lowest, and effluent water quality did not yield effluent standards. The kinetic parameters U max (the maximum substrate removal rate constant) and K B (the saturation constant) of the Stover-Kincannon model corresponding to the different COD/TN ratios were determined in this study. The kinetic parameter values of the ammonium removal process decreased gradually from U max = 0.

Performance of single‐stage partial nitritation and anammox reactor treating low‐phenol/ammonia ratio wastewater and analysis of microbial community structure

“…Therefore, it faces greater challenges for the start-up and operation of the single-stage PN/A reactor (Lauchnor & Semprini, 2013;Pereira et al, 2014). As reported, adjusting the carbon to nitrogen ratio was critical to the successful operation of PN/A process (Nguyen et al, 2020), because carbon and nitrogen resources influenced directly the growth of heterotrophic bacteria, AOB, and anammox bacteria (Jenni et al, 2014). Phenol is a toxic pollutant which affected the activity of AOB, NOB, and anammox bacteria (Lauchnor & Semprini, 2013;Liu et al, 2005).…”

Editorial: April 2021

“…April's issue of Water Environment Research presents new research on topics important to water quality engineers and scientists: biodegradation of hazardous organic compounds (Lee & Ulrich, 2020) and microconstituents (Rao et al, 2020), removal of fluoride (Bilici Baskan & Biyikli, 2020), membrane fouling (Liu et al, 2020), and electrochemical disinfection (Qing et al, 2020), among others. The issue also includes original research on nutrient removal from around the world: the microbial communities involved in anammox from Las Barrillas estuary, Mexico (Ronzón Bravo et al, 2020), impact of COD/TN on anammox for influents simulating those from Vietnam (Nguyen & Tran, 2020), and electrocoagulation for ammonia removal from landfill leachate in Malaysia (Hamid et al, 2020). For this month's Editor's choice, I will highlight work by Zuo et al testing the addition of glycine betaine as a technique for reducing inhibition during nutrient removal processes due to salinity (Zuo et al, 2020).…”