Simultaneous anaerobic carbon and nitrogen removal from primary municipal wastewater with hydrogel encapsulated anaerobic digestion sludge and AOA-anammox coated hollow fiber membrane

Abstract

In this study, a one-stage continuous-flow membrane-hydrogel reactor integrating both partial nitritation-anammox (PN-anammox) and anaerobic digestion (AD) was designed and operated for simultaneous autotrophic nitrogen (N) and anaerobic carbon (C) removal from mainstream municipal wastewater. In the reactor, a synthetic biofilm consisting of anammox biomass and pure culture ammonia oxidizing archaea (AOA) were coated onto and maintained on a counter-diffusion hollow fiber membrane to autotrophically remove nitrogen. Anaerobic digestion sludge was encapsulated in hydrogel beads and placed in the reactor to anaerobically remove COD. During the pilot operation at three operating temperature (25, 16 and 10 °C), the membrane-hydrogel reactor demonstrated stable anaerobic COD removal (76.2 ± 15.5 %) and membrane fouling was successfully suppressed allowing a relatively stable PN-anammox process. The reactor demonstrated good nitrogen removal efficiency, with an overall removal efficiency of 95.8 ± 5.0 % for NH4+-N and 78.9 ± 13.2 % for total inorganic nitrogen (TIN) during the entire pilot operation. Reducing the temperature to 10 °C caused a temporary reduction in nitrogen removal performance and abundances of AOA and anammox. However, the reactor and microbes demonstrated the ability to adapt to the low temperature spontaneously with recovered nitrogen removal performance and microbial abundances. Methanogens in hydrogel beads and AOA and anammox on the membrane were observed in the reactor by qPCR and 16S sequencing across all operational temperatures.