Calcium phosphate precipitation in nitrified wastewater from the potato-processing industry.

Increasing environmental concerns and the awareness of the finite nature of natural resources make the valorization of waste materials to become a real challenge. The objective of the current research is to investigate the possibility of phosphate recovery as calcium phosphate salts from the wastewater from the potato-processing industry. Batch tests demonstrated that at high pH, struvite and calcium carbonate precipitations are competitive processes and that bicarbonate inhibits the precipitation of calcium phosphate salts. A biological nitrification of the wastewater removed the buffering capacity, the competitive formation of struvite and paved the way for phosphate precipitation as calcium phosphate salts as it also led to the simultaneous removal of (bi)carbonates. It is demonstrated that 75% of the phosphate precipitated as calcium phosphate at a [Ca2+]/[P] ratio of 2.5 at pH 8.5 and as such it provides a convenient alternative for the currently applied struvite processes in the agro-industrial industry.

The fate of nitrite and nitrate during anaerobic digestion.

Anaerobic digestion is widely used to produce renewable energy. However, the main drawback is the limited conversion efficiency of organic matter. Applying an advanced oxidation process as a digestate post-treatment is able to increase this conversion efficiency but will also lead to the oxidation of ammonium to nitrite or nitrate. In this lab-scale study, the fate of the latter in the digester was investigated. Nitrite and nitrate were therefore added in concentrations that could arise from rate-limiting ammonium concentrations (1.25-5 g L-1 N). The study clearly demonstrated that nitrite and nitrate were denitrified during the subsequent digestion process resulting in the formation of nitrogen gas. After a concentration-dependent adaptation period, in which some biogas was produced, the added nitrite was denitrified in amounts proportional to the amounts of electron donor present. This denitrification, however, strongly reduces the possibility that Anammox bacteria can develop. Nitrate was also denitrified in amounts proportional to the amounts of electron donor, but biogas production was not completely blocked in this case. Moreover, high concentrations of nitrite and nitrate inhibited their own denitrification. The methane formed was used as electron donor for the further denitrification of nitrate and nitrite when no other readily available electron donor was present. After addition of either nitrite or nitrate and their denitrification, the biogas production did not recover properly.

The inhibitory effect of inorganic carbon on phosphate recovery from upflow anaerobic sludge blanket reactor (UASB) effluent as calcium phosphate.

After treatment of the wastewater from the potato processing industry in an upflow anaerobic sludge blanket reactor (UASB) the effluent is rich in phosphate and dissolved inorganic carbon (IC). Increasing the pH of the UASB effluent with NaOH to precipitate phosphate as calcium phosphate leads to contamination with magnesium phosphate. Increasing the pH with Ca(OH)2 had a positive effect on phosphate precipitation, but after increasing the pH with Na2CO3 no precipitate was formed. After prior nitrification of the UASB effluent to remove IC, less NaOH was needed to increase the pH and the ions precipitated in a ratio that agreed with calcium phosphate formation. When the pH of the nitrified effluent was increased with Na2CO3 neither calcium nor phosphate precipitated. This inhibitory effect of IC on phosphate precipitation as calcium phosphate could not be derived from the saturation indexes calculated by the geochemical modelling program PHREEQC.

Autotrophic nitrogen removal after ureolytic phosphate precipitation to remove both endogenous and exogenous nitrogen.

Anaerobic digestion yields effluents rich in ammonium and phosphate and poor in biodegradable organic carbon, thereby making them less suitable for conventional biological nitrogen and phosphorus removal. In addition, the demand for fertilizers is increasing, energy prices are rising and global phosphate reserves are declining. This requires both changes in wastewater treatment technologies and implementation of new processes. In this contribution a description is given of the combination of a ureolytic phosphate precipitation (UPP) and an autotrophic nitrogen removal (ANR) process on the anaerobic effluent of a potato processing company. The results obtained show that it is possible to recover phosphate as struvite and to remove the nitrogen with the ANR process. The ANR process was performed in either one or two reactors (partial nitritation + Anammox). The one-reactor configuration operated stably when the dissolved oxygen was kept between 0.1 and 0.35 mg L(-1). The best results for the two-reactor system were obtained when part of the effluent of the UPP was fully nitrified in a nitritation reactor and mixed in a 3:5 volumetric ratio with untreated ammonium-containing effluent. A phosphate and nitrogen removal efficiency of respectively 83 ± 1% and of 86 ± 7% was observed during this experiment.

Evaluation and thermodynamic calculation of ureolytic magnesium ammonium phosphate precipitation from UASB effluent at pilot scale.

The removal of phosphate as magnesium ammonium phosphate (MAP, struvite) has gained a lot of attention. A novel approach using ureolytic MAP crystallization (pH increase by means of bacterial ureases) has been tested on the anaerobic effluent of a potato processing company in a pilot plant and compared with NuReSys(®) technology (pH increase by means of NaOH). The pilot plant showed a high phosphate removal efficiency of 83 ± 7%, resulting in a final effluent concentration of 13 ± 7 mg · L(-1) PO(4)-P. Calculating the evolution of the saturation index (SI) as a function of the remaining concentrations of Mg(2+), PO(4)-P and NH(4)(+) during precipitation in a batch reactor, resulted in a good estimation of the effluent PO(4)-P concentration of the pilot plant, operating under continuous mode. X-ray diffraction (XRD) analyses confirmed the presence of struvite in the small single crystals observed during experiments. The operational cost for the ureolytic MAP crystallization treating high phosphate concentrations (e.g. 100 mg · L(-1) PO(4)-P) was calculated as 3.9 € kg(-1) P(removed). This work shows that the ureolytic MAP crystallization, in combination with an autotrophic nitrogen removal process, is competitive with the NuReSys(®) technology in terms of operational cost and removal efficiency but further research is necessary to obtain larger crystals.