Studies on the UBD Microorganism to the Adaptability of Sewage

Abstract

The objective of this study was to evaluate the adaptability of the UBD microorganism on the biodegradation of three kinds of different wastewater as one of the applications of bio-augmentation technique in lab-scale batch experiments by directly adding UBD into the bioreactor. After biodegradation, the removal of chemical oxygen demand was lower than 50%; on the other hand, the total removal of total petroleum hydrocarbons was maintained at 70% in coking wastewater with different initial chemical oxygen demand and total petroleum hydrocarbon. At the same time, the removal of chemical oxygen demand was up to 83.7 and 93.2% in crude oil-water emulsion and diesel-water emulsion, respectively, at the optimized biodegrade conditions. The chemical oxygen demand was degraded from 1,321.3 to 256.3 mg/L, meanwhile the total petroleum hydrocarbon was degraded from 65.69 to 4.98 mg/L in actual refinery sewage under the optimal biodegradation conditions that were 500 μL/L (v/v) concentration of UBD and continuous aeration, which was much better than natural conditions.