Effect of Sludge Type on Enhanced Biological Phosphorus Removal in Sequencing Batch Reactors

Abstract

Aerobic granulation technology has become a novel biotechnology for wastewater treatment. However, the study of distinct properties and characteristics of phosphorus removal between granules and flocculent sludge are still sparse in EBPR. Two SBRs were concurrently operated to investigate the different phosphorus removal characteristics between granules (R1) and flocculate sludge (R2). Results indicated that R2 had a faster progress for enriching phosphorus‐accumulating organisms compared with R1, and the phosphorus removal reached the steady state after 40 days in R1 but only 30 days in R2. The moisture content of granules (85.63%) was smaller than that (91.36%) in R2, and the granules had a higher removal efficiency of NH4+‐N. However, flocculent sludge could release and take up more phosphorus. The special phosphorus release rate (SPRR) and special phosphorus uptake rate (SPUR) were 8.818 mg/gVSS⋅h and 9.921 mg/gVSS⋅h in R2 which were consistently larger than that (0.999 mg/gVSS⋅h and 0.754 mg/gVSS⋅h) in R1. The results of DGGE of PCR‐amplified 16SrDNA fragments revealed that the diversity and the amount of phosphorus accumulating microbial of bacteria in flocculent sludge were much more than that in the granules. It can be concluded that the flocculent sludge showed a better phosphorus removal.