Tertiary treatment for wastewater reuse based on the Daphnia magna filtration - comparison with conventional tertiary treatments.

Tertiary treatments are required to permit safe reuse of wastewater. The performance of a new biological tertiary treatment based on the filtration by a population of Daphnia magna was studied and compared with the performance of other conventional tertiary treatments such as coagulation-flocculation, settling tank, disc filtration, sand filtering and ultraviolet (UV) light. The analysis was based on the efficiency in the particle removal and Escherichia coli inactivation. The Daphnia magna treatment reduced the concentration of particles with diameters below 30 µm by 35%, depending on abiotic parameters such as water temperature and the hydraulic retention time (HRT). The Daphnia magna filtration increased with water temperature for water temperatures >20 °C, while it remained constant for water temperatures <20 °C. Lower HRTs induced the growth of the Daphnia magna population, maintaining the same water quality. Furthermore, the Daphnia magna treatment inactivated E. coli in 1.2 log units. This inactivation was six times larger than that obtained by the conventional macrofiltration systems analyzed, although lower than the inactivation attained by UV light, which ranged between 1.5 and 4 log units.

Filtering capacity of Daphnia magna on sludge particles in treated wastewater.

A great challenge in water reuse is the reduction of suspended particle concentration in wastewater. In particular the reduction of the presence of small particles in suspension which cause a cloudy appearance in the water and, which also make disinfection difficult. The present study evaluates the filtering capacity of a population of Cladodera (Daphnia magna) in secondary effluents from a wastewater plant. The study was performed in both a mesocosm and the laboratory, in an effort to compare the grazing on sludge particles by Daphnia versus the settling rate of those sludge particles. The particle volume concentration of small particles (with a diameter below 30 µm) was used to evaluate the efficiency of the proposed biotreatment system for small particles. Both laboratory and mesocosm results showed that the suspended particle volume concentration decreased with time due to the Daphnia filtration, with the highest reduction in experiments carried out with the highest Daphnia concentration. In the mesocosm experiments, the Daphnia diameter was also found to play an important role, with an allometric relationship between the filtering rate of Daphnia and the Daphnia nondimensional diameter. In laboratory experiments, the effect of D. magna in the suspended concentration of small particles was in the range of 10.1-29.4%, according to the range of Daphnia concentration of 10-50 ind/l. For laboratory experiments, sedimentation was responsible for 62.2% of the suspended particle concentration reduction. For the mesocosm experiments, the reduction in the particle concentration attributed to the Daphnia filtration ranged between 2.5 and 39%, corresponding to Daphnia concentrations of between 5 and 100 ind/l (i.e. biovolumes of 8-60 ind/l).