Heterotrophic bacteria isolated from a chloraminated system accelerate chloramine decay.

This work comprehensively demonstrates the ability of heterotrophic bacteria, isolated from a chloraminated system, to decay chloramine. This study non-selectively isolated 62 cultures of heterotrophic bacteria from a water sample (0.002 mg-N/L nitrite and 1.42 mg/L total chlorine) collected from a laboratory-scale reactor system; most of the isolates (93.3%) were Mycobacterium sp. Three species of Mycobacterium and one species of Micrococcus were inoculated to a basal inorganic medium with initial concentrations of acetate (from 0 to 24 mg-C/L) and 1.5 mg/L chloramine. Bacterial growth coincided with declines in the concentrations of chloramine, acetate, and ammonium. Detailed experiments with one of the Mycobacterium sp. isolates suggest that the common mechanism of chloramine loss is auto-decomposition likely mediated by chloramine-decaying proteins. The ability of the isolates to grow and decay chloramine underscores the important role of heterotrophic bacteria in the stability of chloramine in water-distribution systems. Existing strategies based on controlling nitrification should be augmented to include minimizing heterotrophic bacteria.

Investigation on laboratory and pilot-scale airlift sulfide oxidation reactor under varying sulfide loading rate.

Airlift bioreactor was established for recovering sulfur from synthetic sulfide wastewater under controlled dissolved oxygen condition. The maximum recovered sulfur was 14.49 g/day when sulfide loading rate, dissolved oxygen (DO) and pH values were 2.97 kgHS(-)/m(3)-day, 0.2-1.0 mg/L and 7.2-7.8, respectively. On the other hand, the increase in recovered sulfur reduced the contact surface of sulfide oxidizing bacteria which affects the recovery process. This effect caused to reduce the conversion of sulfide to sulfur. More recovered sulfur was produced at high sulfide loading rate due to the change of metabolic pathway of sulfide-oxidizing bacteria which prevented the toxicity of sulfide in the culture. The maximum activity in this system was recorded to be about 3.28 kgS/kgVSS-day. The recovered sulfur contained organic compounds which were confirmed by the results from XRD and CHN analyzer. Afterwards, by annealing the recovered sulfur at 120 degrees C for 24 hrs under ambient Argon, the percentage of carbon reduced from 4.44% to 0.30%. Furthermore, the percentage of nitrogen and hydrogen decreased from 0.79% and 0.48% to 0.00% and 0.14%, respectively. This result showed the success in increasing the purity of recovered sulfur by using the annealing technique. The pilot-scale biological sulfide oxidation process was carried out using real wastewater from Thai Rayon Industry in Thailand. The airlift reactor successfully removed sulfide more than 90% of the influent sulfide at DO concentration of less than 0.1 mg/L, whereas the elementary sulfur production was 2.37 kgS/m(3)-day at sulfide loading rate of 2.14 kgHS(-)/m(3)-day. The sulfur production was still increasing as the reactor had not yet reached its maximum sulfide loading rate.