Mustafa M Bob
Taibah University, Kingdom of Saudi Arabia
Title: Aerobic granulation for wastewater treatment: performance evaluation at elevated temperature using real waste water
Biography
Biography: Mustafa M Bob
Abstract
Aerobic granulation is a novel environmental biotechnological process that has recently received the interest of researchers working in the area of biological wastewater treatment. Application of aerobic granular sludge (AGS) in treatment of wastewater using laboratory sequencing batch reactors (SBR) has shown that this technology is a promising technology in wastewater treatment. Th ese studies have demonstrated the fast settling properties of AGS which facilitate biomass retention. In addition, the studies demonstrated the presence of substrate profi les across the granule radius, which allows concurrent aerobic, anoxic and anaerobic processes into the same granule. To date, most of the research work on AGS has been carried out using synthetic wastewater at a temperature of 30 oC or lower and no research has been conducted to evaluate the performance of AGS at elevated temperature using real wastewater. In this research, the possibility of cultivating AGS by using SBR system in treating real domestic wastewater at high temperature (50 °C) was investigated. Th e samples of seed sludge were obtained from the wastewater treatment plant of Madinah, Saudi Arabia a city that has a desert-like climate with temperature reaching close to 50°C during summer time. All experiments were executed in a sequencing batch reactor (SBR) with a complete cycle time of 3 h. Stable mature granules with average diameters between 2.0 and 5.0 mm and good biomass concentration of 5.8 g L−1 were observed in the bioreactor. Promising results in treatment of the domestic wastewater were achieved with good removal rates of 84.4 %, 99.6 % and 81.7 % for COD, ammonia (NH3) and total phosphorus (TP), respectively. Th e study demonstrated the formation capabilities of AGS in a single, high and slender column type-bioreactor at high temperature which is suitable to be applied in hot climate condition areas especially countries with tropical and desert like climates.