| 1. |
- Achermann, Stefan, et al.
(author)
-
Trends in Micropollutant Biotransformation along a Solids Retention Time Gradient
- 2018
-
In: Environmental Science and Technology. - : American Chemical Society (ACS). - 0013-936X .- 1520-5851. ; 52:20, s. 11601-11611
-
Journal article (peer-reviewed)abstract
- For many polar organic micropollutants, biotransformation by activated sludge microorganisms is a major removal process during wastewater treatment. However, our current understanding of how wastewater treatment operations influence microbial communities and their micropollutant biotransformation potential is limited, leaving major parts of observed variability in biotransformation rates across treatment facilities unexplained. Here, we present biotransformation rate constants for 42 micropollutants belonging to different chemical classes along a gradient of solids retention time (SRT). The geometric mean of biomass-normalized first-order rate constants shows a clear increase between 3 and 15 d SRT by 160% and 87%, respectively, in two experiments. However, individual micropollutants show a variety of trends. Rate constants of oxidative biotransformation reactions mostly increased with SRT. Yet, nitrifying activity could be excluded as primary driver. For substances undergoing other than oxidative reactions, i.e., mostly substitution-type reactions, more diverse dependencies on SRT were observed. Most remarkably, characteristic trends were observed for groups of substances undergoing similar types of initial transformation reaction, suggesting that shared enzymes or enzyme systems that are conjointly regulated catalyze biotransformation reactions within such groups. These findings open up opportunities for correlating rate constants with measures of enzyme abundance such as genes or gene products, which in turn should help to identify enzymes associated with the respective biotransformation reactions.
|
|
| 2. |
- Falås, Per, et al.
(author)
-
Transformation, CO2 formation and uptake of four organic micropollutants by carrier-attached microorganisms
- 2018
-
In: Water Research. - : Elsevier BV. - 0043-1354. ; 141, s. 405-416
-
Journal article (peer-reviewed)abstract
- A tiered process was developed to assess the transformation, CO2 formation and uptake of four organic micropollutants by carrier-attached microorganisms from two municipal wastewater treatment plants. At the first tier, primary transformation of ibuprofen, naproxen, diclofenac, and mecoprop by carrier-attached microorganisms was shown by the dissipation of the target compounds and the formation of five transformation products using LC-tandem MS. At the second tier, the microbial cleavage of the four organic micropollutants was confirmed with 14C-labeled micropollutants through liquid scintillation counting of the 14CO2 formed. At the third tier, microautoradiography coupled with fluorescence in situ hybridization (MAR-FISH) was used to screen carrier-attached microorganisms for uptake of the four radiolabeled micropollutants. Results from the MAR-FISH screening indicated that only a small fraction of the microbial community (≤1‰) was involved in the uptake of the radiolabeled micropollutants and that the responsible microorganisms differed between the compounds. At the fourth tier, the microbial community structure of the carrier-attached biofilms was analyzed by 16S rRNA gene amplicon sequencing. The sequencing results showed that the MAR-FISH screening targeted ∼80% of the microbial community and that several taxonomic families within the FISH-probed populations with MAR-positive signals (i.e. Firmicutes, Gammaproteobacteria, and Deltaproteobacteria) were present in both biofilms. From the broader perspective of organic micropollutant removal in biological wastewater treatment, the MAR-FISH results of this study indicate a high degree of microbial substrate specialization that could explain differences in transformation rates and patterns between micropollutants and microbial communities.
|
|
| 3. |
- Malovanyy, Andriy, 1984-
(author)
-
Anammox-based systems for nitrogen removal from mainstream municipal wastewater
- 2017
-
Doctoral thesis (other academic/artistic)abstract
- Nitrogen removal from municipal wastewater with the application of deammonification process offers an operational cost reduction, especially if it is combined with a maximal use of organic content of wastewater for biogas production. In this thesis, two approaches for integration of the deammonification process into the municipal wastewater treatment scheme were studied.The first approach is based on ammonium concentration from municipal wastewater by ion exchange followed by biological removal of ammonium from the concentrated stream by deammonification process. Experiments with synthetic and real municipal wastewater showed that strong acid cation resin is suitable for ammonium concentration due to its high exchange capacity and fast regeneration. Since NaCl was used for regeneration of ion exchange materials, spent regenerant had elevated salinity. The deammonification biomass was adapted to NaCl content of 10-15 g/L by step-wise salinity increase. The technology was tested in batch mode with 99.9 % of ammonium removal from wastewater with ion exchange and up to 95 % of nitrogen removal from spent regenerant by deammonification process.The second studied approach was to apply anammox process to low-concentrated municipal wastewater in a moving bed biofilm reactor (MBBR) and integrated fixed film activated sludge (IFAS) system without a pre-concentration step. After a 5 months period of transition to mainstream wastewater the pilot plant was operated during 22 months and stable performance of one-stage deammonification was proven. Clear advantage of IFAS system was shown. The highest stable nitrogen removal efficiency of 70 % and a nitrogen removal rate of 55 g N/(m3·d) was reached. Moreover, the influence of operation conditions on competition between ammonium oxidizing bacteria (AOB) and nitrite oxidizing bacteria (NOB) was studied by literature review, batch tests and continuous pilot plant operation.
|
|
| 4. |
- Nürenberg, Gudrun, et al.
(author)
-
Nontarget analysis : A new tool for the evaluation of wastewater processes
- 2019
-
In: Water Research. - : Elsevier BV. - 0043-1354. ; 163
-
Journal article (peer-reviewed)abstract
- Strategies to determine the removal efficiency of micropollutants in wastewater treatment plants (WWTPs) are widely discussed. Especially the evaluation of the potential benefit of further advanced treatment steps such as an additional tertiary treatment based on ozonation or activated carbon have come into focus. Such evaluation strategies are often based on the removal behavior of known micropollutants via target or suspected analysis. The utilization of nontarget analysis is considered to lead to a more comprehensive picture as also unknown or not expected micropollutants are analyzed. Here, the results of an evaluation via target and nontarget analysis were compared for biological treatment (BT) processes of eleven full-scale WWTPs and three different post-treatments (PTs): one sand filter (SF) and two granular activated carbon (GAC) filters. The similarity of the determined removals from target and nontarget analysis of the BTs increased significantly by excluding easily degradable “features” from the nontarget evaluation. A similar ranking of the removal trends for the BTs could also be achieved by comparing this new subset of nontarget features with a set of nine readily to moderately biodegradable micropollutants. This observation suggests that a performance ranking of BTs based either on target or nontarget analysis is plausible. In contrast to the BTs, the evaluation of the three PTs revealed that the difference of feature removal between SF and the two GACs was small, but large for the target analytes with substantially higher removal effciencies for the GACs compared to the SF. In addition to the removal behavior, the nontarget analysis provided further information about the number and quantity of transformation products (TPs) in the effluent from the BTs. For all BTs more than half (55–67%) of the features detected in the effluent were not found in the influent. A comparable proportion of TPs was also detected after GAC and sand filtration due to their microbial activities.
|
|
