Jiadong Liu

Characteristics of PAHs adsorption on inorganic particles and activated sludge in domestic wastewater treatment

The occurrence of polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons (PAHs) in a domestic wastewater treatment plant (WWTP) was investigated in a 1 year period. In order to understand how PAHs were removed at different stages of the treatment process, adsorption experiments were conducted using quartz sand, kaolinite, and natural clay as inorganic adsorbents and activated sludge as organic adsorbent for adsorbing naphthalene, phenanthrene, and pyrene. As a result, the adsorption of PAHs by the inorganic adsorbents well followed the Langmuir isotherm while that by the activated sludge well followed the Freundlich isotherm. By bridging equilibrium partitioning coefficient with the parameters of adsorption isotherm, a set of mathematical models were developed. Under an assumption that in the primary settler PAHs removal was by adsorption onto inorganic particles and in the biological treatment unit it was by adsorption onto activated sludge, the model calculation results fairly reflected the practical condition in the WWTP.

Membrane fouling behavior in anaerobic baffled membrane bioreactor under static operating condition

A novel AnMBR combined with ABR as the anaerobic baffled membrane bioreactor (ABMBR) was developed for membrane fouling mitigation without any turbulence intensifying strategy to reduce the energy consumption further. The filtration time of this system lasted 14-25days under stable condition only with back-flushing every 48h. The polysaccharide accounted for 6.85±3.1% amount of total filter cake and the protein accounted for 4.12±2.1%, which took 79.12% and 11.12% of total area in laser scanning confocal microscope (CLSM) image. After filtration, 83.72±10.97% of turbidity, 59.28±16.46% of polysaccharide, 16.51% of tryptophan and 37.61% of humic-like substrates were rejected, respectively. The total membrane resistance at the end of each cycle was (4.47±0.99)×10(13)m(-1). And the resistance from filter cake was (4.15±1.00)×10(13)m(-1), which accounted for of 92.6±3.4% of total membrane resistance.

The tubular MFC with carbon tube air-cathode for power generation and N,N-dimethylacetamide treatment

ABSTRACT A continuous flow microbial fuel cell (MFC) was assembled with carbon tube air-cathode and carbon felt anode. The organic solvent N,N-dimethylacetamide (DMAC) was used as the only carbon source for power generation. After the adaptive phase, the cell potential was gradually increased from 0.15 to 0.45 V with 200 Ω of external resistor during 150 h of operation. The calculated power density of this MFC was 100 mW L−1 when the cell potential was 0.45 V. The reversible redox peaks of carbon tube were obtained in cyclic voltammogram between −0.5 and −0.25 V under aerobic circumstance. The removal rate of DMAC was 15–50% after treatment with hydraulic retention time of 12 min. The results indicated that it is possible to realize the power extraction from DMAC wastewater in the form of electricity by the bioconversion process of MFC.