Nitrogen removal from eutrophic water using Biological Reactors

Abstract

Conventional treatment methods available to remove organic matter are a combination of physical, chemical and biological processes. The limiting nutrients such as nitrates and phosphates are responsible for eutrophication in water bodies. But all the said above existing conventional methods result in negligible reduction nitrogen removal. In this paper, a study is carried out to compare the nitrogen removal efficiency from synthetic wastewater using Continuous Flow Integrated Biological Reactor and Sequencing Batch Reactor. In the continuous Flow Integrated Biological Reactor, a three phase separator was used to obtain consistent nitrogen removal efficiency under appropriate operation conditions of 2hour aeration, 2hour agitation, and 2hour settling. The average nitrogen removal efficiency was found to be 82.2% with Continuous Flow Integrated Biological Reactor and the same for Sequencing Biological Reactor was 64.4%. The Chemical Oxygen Demand removal efficiency using Continuous Flow Integrated Biological Reactor obtained was found to be 74.5% and the same using Sequencing Batch Reactor was 59.6%. The second phase of the study was carried out on water sample collected from Eutophic Akkulam Veli lake of Trivandrum district, Kerala and the results obtained showed almost similar trend with that for synthetic wastewater. Here the Continuous Flow Integrated Biological Reactor process proved to be better in removing nitrogen compared to that of sequencing batch reactor.