Enhanced Phosphorus Removal during Municipal Wastewater Treatment by the Biological Aeration Filter with Modified Steel Slags
Publication: Journal of Environmental Engineering
Volume 148, Issue 5
Abstract
Excessive phosphorus in aquatic environments can lead to eutrophication, posing a significant deterioration of water quality. In this study, modified steel slag was used as a novel filter media in the biological aeration filter (BAF) to achieve a bioinduced phosphorus crystallization process for simultaneous removal and recovery of phosphorus from municipal wastewater. Phosphorus removal efficiency could reach 80% during 4 days of operation due to high adsorption capacity of the modified steel slag in the single BAF reactor, but the phosphorus removal efficiency decreased to 30% after 30 days of operation. The phosphorus removal efficiency of the BAF system increased to 70% under alternating anaerobic-aerobic (A/O) operation condition. Concentration of in anaerobic effluent reached at 68 days of operation and exceeded that in influent (), indicating that phosphorus accumulating organisms (PAOs) were successfully enriched in the alternating A/O BAF system. Hydroxyapatite (HAP) crystals formation was confirmed based on analysis of scanning electron microscopy coupled with energy dispersive X-ray (SEM-EDX) and X-ray diffraction (XRD). The proposed phosphorus removal mechanism suggests that the release of phosphorus from PAOs and the release of and from the modified steel slag is beneficial to HAP crystals formation. These results indicated that the bioinduced phosphorus crystallization process achieved to improve phosphorus removal efficiency of the alternating A/O BAF system. This finding is a significant improvement to both biological and crystallization phosphorus removal processes, and has significant potential application for removal and recovery of phosphorus in wastewater treatment.
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Data Availability Statement
All data, models, and code generated or used during the study appear in the published article.
Acknowledgments
This study was financially supported by the National Science Foundation of China (51678276 and 52100088), the funding program of 20 policies for universities in Jinan (2018GXRC020), the Project of Shandong Province Higher Educational Youth Innovation Science and Technology Program (2020KJG003), and the Natural Science Foundation of Shandong Province (ZR2020ME227).
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Published In
Journal of Environmental Engineering
Volume 148 • Issue 5 • May 2022
Copyright
© 2022 American Society of Civil Engineers.
History
Received: Oct 15, 2021
Accepted: Jan 22, 2022
Published online: Mar 12, 2022
Published in print: May 1, 2022
Discussion open until: Aug 12, 2022
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