Nutrient recovery and microalgae biomass production from urine by membrane photobioreactor at low biomass retention times

Microalgae production in human urine: Fundamentals, opportunities, and perspectives

“…Frontiers in Microbiology 10 frontiersin.org (Nguyen et al, 2021). Results Figure 4 indicate that BRT may have a positive relationship with nutrients removal from urine.…”

“…Likewise, when S. platensis was applied to swine wastewater, it was reported that ammonia removal ranged from 84% to 96% (Chang et al, 2013). Figure 4 summarizes the nitrogen and phosphorus removal by microalgae cultivation from urine in different literature (Adamsson, 2000;Yang et al, 2008;Chang et al, 2013;Tuantet et al, 2013Tuantet et al, , 2014Tuantet et al, , 2019Zhu et al, 2013;Zhang et al, 2014;de Wilt et al, 2016;Jaatinen et al, 2016;Piltz and Melkonian, 2017;Chatterjee et al, 2019;Chen et al, 2020;Nguyen et al, 2021). Generally, a higher illumination/light intensity and a longer cultivation time (or BRT) would result in higher N and P removal.…”

“…Red circles: dilution >20, and blue circles: dilution <10. Data were achieved from the literature (Adamsson, 2000;Yang et al, 2008;Chang et al, 2013;Tuantet et al, 2013Tuantet et al, , 2014Tuantet et al, , 2019Zhu et al, 2013;Zhang et al, 2014;de Wilt et al, 2016;Jaatinen et al, 2016;Piltz and Melkonian, 2017;Chatterjee et al, 2019;Chen et al, 2020;Nguyen et al, 2021).…”

“…A short BRT (2-5 days) may not be sufficient to sustain the rapid growth of microalgae, which consequently limits the biomass production rate even when a high nitrogen uptake rate is obtained (Luo et al, 2017;Praveen et al, 2019). Likewise, the highest TP removal of 52.1% was achieved at a BRT of 7 days during incubation (Nguyen et al, 2021). It should be noted that a longer BRT may result in the deterioration of the settling/harvesting properties of the biomass (Wang et al, 2013;Ma et al, 2018a).…”

“…In the study by Chang et al (2013), 97% of ammonium nitrogen, 96.5% of the total phosphorus (TP) and 85%-98% of urea in diluted urine could be removed by microalgae, the practice of which has closed the gap between waste management and sustainable resource exploitation (Behera et al, 2020). With regard to the challenges in biomass separation from the dilute media, a membrane photobioreactor (MPBR) has been proposed and deployed for the continuous cultivation of microalgae (Nguyen et al, 2021). An unofficial Scopus search of the literature on "(Micro)algae" and "Urine" was carried out for the timeline from 2000 to 2022 (Figure 1), with the results demonstrating a quick increase in the publication number in the past decade.…”